I was paddling about the ocean-view pool at the Ritz Carlton Bali last Sunday, the most important decision on my mind being the flavor of the next cold beer I'd order and whether late check-out could be extended till the evening, when bikini-ed J beckoned from the deck, waving my cell and looking concerned.
We're talking a well deserved break from a month of consecutive 14-hour work days in Banda Aceh and luxuriating in the wake of a friend's heart-warming Bali wedding so I'm not handling 'concerned' very well.
"It's Joe. He says its important."
If Big Joe is calling from Bangkok to drag me out of the pool he's gotta have a good reason. I hate these moments.
"Dude, I hate to interrupt you on your holiday but m'afraid I've got bad news. Marla Ruzicka is dead. Looks like a suicide bomber on the road out to Baghdad airport."
For a moment I'm dead silent. The name I know but I'm struggling for a face.
"Sorry, Big Joe. Help me out."
"Marla," he says. "Marla."
Damn. I'm not sure I ever knew her family name.
Lovely, focused, irritating, bubbly, Bay-area surfer-girl, Marla. Marla of Kabul, lately of Baghdad. And a hundred other places none of us will ever go. Marla the shit-disturber. Marla the befriender of bitter South African mercenaries, inebriated war-hardened journalists, or orphaned children, widowed mothers.
Sofa-surfing, satellite-phone borrowing, impecunious, slightly pigeon-toed, Marla. Kaftan-wearing, big-toothed, joint-rolling, cocktail pouring, "let's wander down Chicken Street and... ohmygod is that old Arani under that ratty old burkha begging outside the Mustapha hotel.... AIRRAAAANNIII"... Marla. That Marla.
Marla who single-handedly, through sheer force of character and go-gettum gumption drove the US government to distraction with her quiet demands for an accounting of the civilian dead in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Who - it is not an overstatement - alone developed the political savy of the beltway boys and the tongue of a career diplomat to extract millions of dollars in compensation for the victims of American bombs.
Marla, who despite her noteriety by that time sailed past the concertina wire, security checks and leashed German Shepards into a press conference at the US embassy in Kabul in early 2002 to nail down the oily special representative from DC in the $1,500.00 suit on the issue of compensation. And in the process, did a clinic on "conforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" that shamed the assembled A-list of journos.
And now some evil sonofabitch has gone and killed her.
One report a couple of days ago quoted a US soldier at the scene saying she survived the initial blast with severe burns to 90 per cent of her body. He told a reporter that she said, "I'm still alive."

Marla's being buried today in California and I'm going to go home and read Annie Proulx till sleep comes.

(Here's a couple of recent pieces; Pam from the WashPost knew her better than most.)


A Disarming Presence In a Dangerous World
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 19, 2005; Page C01
It was an especially bleak moment on a frozen night in Afghanistan, just before Thanksgiving in 2001. An assortment of grizzled correspondents was crammed into a filthy hotel. That week four of our colleagues had been ambushed and killed by gunmen on the highway to Kabul, and we were all in shock. One evening several of us were lingering over coffee in the dining room, too depressed to head back to our rooms to work.
Out of nowhere, a perky blond apparition materialized at the table. She looked about 16, and she was wearing pajamas with cartoon animals under an Afghan robe. She introduced herself as Marla and started chirping about how she had just come from California to work on human rights issues.
We all stared at each other in disbelief. She seemed so young and vulnerable that we were seized with the identical, protective thought: Marla, go home.
But Marla Ruzicka stayed on, working to bring public awareness and official help to the plight of war victims in Afghanistan. Later she moved her one-woman human rights crusade to Iraq, where she was killed Saturday in a suicide bombing at age 28.
In Kabul, she flitted like a cheerful sprite through our hard-bitten war correspondents' world, alighting on our couches for the night and floating off with a backpack in the morning. She never had any money, but she had an amazing knack for organizing parties, procuring hidden vodka and making foreigners in a war-ruined Muslim capital feel at home.
Everyone stationed in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban knew her. The men fell in love with her and the women were reminded of themselves, a decade or two younger. At first, Ruzicka seemed too much of a flower child to be taken seriously. Ivan Watson of National Public Radio recalled her kick-boxing with the Afghan cook in the back yard of his house; another correspondent described her giving everyone back rubs after long days.
I remember her scribbling little thank-you notes and invitations with smiley faces on them, and yet another correspondent recalled that when she was leaving Kabul, Ruzicka came to her house early that morning with a gift and a long goodbye note. Over each letter "i" was a heart instead of a dot.
Ruzicka was far from a simpering sandalista. There was a determined agenda behind her ditsy persona, an earnest sense of purpose that enabled her to charm her way through military checkpoints and wring pledges of aid for war victims from congressional offices. While no one was paying much attention, she began systematically compiling data on casualties and damages that resulted from the U.S.-led attack on Kabul. In the spring of 2002, she led a group of Afghan families to the gates of the heavily guarded American embassy to demand compensation for the victims.
After that, we all viewed her with new respect.
"Marla had no guile. There was a complete lack of cynicism, a total selflessness in what she did," said Catherine Philp, a foreign correspondent for the Times of London and one of Ruzicka's closest friends, speaking from New Delhi. "We live in such a jaded community, and she alone seemed untouched. She was like an angel of life, but an angel with a broken wing. It made her seem so fragile that everyone wanted to help her."
After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Ruzicka shifted her efforts to Iraq. By then she had founded a Washington-based organization called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. She shifted from handwritten notes to a barrage of e-mails to friends, journalists and congressional offices. She was still broke, but by the time she arrived in Iraq, many Kabul correspondents had also shifted to Baghdad, so she found a plethora of couches to crash on.
Her mission was the same: to document the damage done to Iraqi civilians and their homes by the war. Baghdad was a far more dangerous place to work than Kabul, with foreigners exposed to far greater risks from suicide bombings, sniper fire and kidnappings. Major news organizations acquired armored cars and armed guards, and many Western journalists were confined to their homes or hotels much of the time.
Once again, Ruzicka took on the role of hostess and hovering angel for the exhausted and stressed-out Baghdad press corps. Richard Leiby of The Washington Post recalled her throwing a party called "Baghdad Needs Some Love." I saw her only a few times during my brief visits to Iraq, but she forged close friendships with full-time correspondents, and her e-mails mixed breezy, Valley Girl jargon with emotional appeals for her project to document and seek compensation for victims of wartime violence.
"She happily reminded me of many of the Greenpeace kids I worked with in the 1980s . . . a bulldog of energy with absolutely no constituency or power," said William Arkin, a peace activist and military affairs writer who worked with Ruzicka in Iraq. Even hardened generals and policymakers, he wrote in an e-mail to a friend Sunday, were disarmed by a beautiful "spitfire of disorganization" who badgered and begged for their help.
Despite her youth, Ruzicka, a native of Lakeport, Calif., had spent much of the last decade as a volunteer for political causes, visiting Cuba and Israel while attending Long Island University, and later joining Global Exchange, a nonprofit group that promotes concern for world poverty and suffering.
While in Iraq, the diminutive Ruzicka ventured out to places few other foreigners dared go, visiting families who had lost relatives or homes in military or terrorist attacks. She took limited precautions, traveling with a single Iraqi assistant and driver, Faiz Ali Salim, who was also killed Saturday by the suicide bombing on a road near the Baghdad airport. Her only protection was the thin disguise of a traditional black abaya, from which wisps of telltale blond hair constantly strayed.
Peter Baker, a Post reporter, first met her in Afghanistan in 2001. "She looked like a high school girl. I remember thinking she was going to get herself killed," he said.
But over time, she became such a familiar presence in war-torn settings, and exuded such an ethereal quality, that she seemed somehow impervious to the evils of war.
"There are so few truly good souls anywhere, but especially in that part of the world," Baker said. "It never occurred to me to think she would be in danger."
For all her moxie, Ruzicka confided to friends that she endured periods of deep self-doubt and anxiety. Despite her nurturing nature, she sometimes seemed to hint at the realization of her own vulnerability. In one recent e-mail to a journalist friend, she signed off with a casual "good vibes to you," but she also added this darker sentence: "I need angels in my life."


Angel of Mercy Marla Ruzicka was one of a kind. The Baghdad death of the unorthodox young aid worker has devastated those who knew her.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Christopher Dickey
Paris Bureau Chief, Middle East Regional Editor
Newsweek
Updated: 2:48 p.m. ET April 19, 2005

April 19 - The last e-mail Marla Ruzicka sent me was in January, when I’d just gotten out of Iraq after a brief visit, and she was getting ready to go in for a long one. She said she’d had a rough few months, since the last time we’d seen each other there, and I asked her what she meant, and how she was doing. Marla, 28, was unforgettably energetic and excited and committed and funny, a quintessential ultra-blonde California girl as goofy at first glance as a young Goldie Hawn, but as genuinely committed to helping people as, well, as anybody I ever met in my life, and more effective than most. Her cause was support for the victims of war; her specialty was cajoling and compelling the United States military to compensate the innocent people it injured and the families of those that it killed. But work in Iraq had gotten so risky that even Marla thought it prudent to stay away for a while.
How had she been feeling? Her note on Jan. 12, so frank and so trusting, was very, very Marla: “You are soooo sweet—yes I had a hard time getting used to not living in the action and some depression—which I want to be open about. I am fine now, in fact I just got out of Nepal where I was doing human rights work and now I am in Kabul—the city has changed so much and I am sooooo emotional about every building etc… I think when you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all—I am working on that—with time, I will get better. X, Marla”
But now there’s no time left. Last weekend, Marla and the Iraqi who worked with her, Faiz al Salaam, were killed along with two other people when a suicide bomber struck on the short, nasty, brutal road to Baghdad airport. And now those of us who knew Marla—the journalists she befriended, the politicians and soldiers she lobbied, the families she helped support—all of us are quite simply devastated.
Joe Cochrane, one of NEWSWEEK’s correspondents in Afghanistan during the post-9/11 war, remembers that Marla “took over Kabul almost as fast as the Northern Alliance seized it from the Taliban.” She’d been a passionate do-gooder since she was in high school. She’d flirted with different leftist organizations and causes, and she’d gotten one to pay her way to the war zone. But once she was there, she started operating on her own, and in her own special way.
“Within weeks after the city fell in 2001,” Joe recalls, “Marla was arguably the most well-known person there. It didn’t matter who you were: U.N. official, diplomat, American soldier, journalist. If you didn’t know Marla, you didn’t know s---. Dressed in a fuzzy winter coat and boots, she was a tornado, spinning into the inner circles of every cliché there to pitch the cause of civilian casualties. Then, when the work was done, you always knew Marla, a regular at the NEWSWEEK house, would have something fun to do that night. She organized dinners, barbeques, parties—even a St. Valentine’s Day dance where she played matchmaker. She was fun, she was cute, she was vibrant. She was, well, Marla.”
We keep saying that, don’t we? She was “Marla.” She was that unique.
“One of her most legendary ideas was to open a bar to raise money for her project,” Joe recalls, “and I did my part by being the guest bartender. Opening night at ‘Club Kabul’ was a smash hit, with more than 125 people ranging from aid workers to journalists to the ambassador of Italy turning out for some much needed drinks and conversation. Marla dressed in a dark lavender dress, played hostess, single-handedly allowing us to forget that we were in a conflict zone thousands of miles from home.” As if she were some Washington hostess with the mostest, she was always networking and lobbying, albeit on a shoestring and in the middle of enormous danger.
Marla asked herself wisely, and perhaps too brutally, if there was not something about war that she loved. She knew the sorrow and the fear, certainly, but she also knew there were adrenaline highs to be had, and she understood there could be something ennobling about the most horrible events. Such conflicting emotions are not uncommon in combat zones, but they are never easy to reconcile inside yourself. “When you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all.”
It’s not surprising that soldiers, always suspicious of Marla at first, often grew to revere her energy, determination and bravery. It’s also not surprising that some fellow aid workers remained hostile. Marla didn’t play by their rules, in fact. “Marla was alienated from much of the human rights community because she chose to work with the military instead of always against it,” says Scott Johnson, NEWSWEEK’s new Baghdad bureau chief, who got to know Marla in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When reporters discovered, soon after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, that the Baghdad neighborhood of Dhoura was littered with little grenade-like munitions from American cluster bombs—some of them hanging from trees, others on the hoods and roofs of cars—the journalists wrote their stories but despaired of actually getting anything done to help the people, even after three in the neighborhood were killed. One reporter told Marla. Two days later the military was in Dhoura cleaning up the bomblets and giving assistance to the families.
“In Afghanistan, she staged protests outside the U.S. embassy and a few weeks later she had won a multi-million-dollar compensation package for Afghan civilian victims,” Scott remembers. Since then, she has won more than $10 million in appropriations for Iraqi victims. Yet the last time Scott saw Marla, in Brooklyn earlier this year, he was still surprised, as one always was, by the way her wide-eyed naïveté would become cold-eyed focus whenever she talked about civilian casualties and what had to be done for them. “She went through the litany of protagonists, talking about [Sen. Bill] Frist and [Sen. Patrick] Leahy and God knows how many other senators, and what bill was coming up in what Senate appropriations committee and when, and who was going to vote for it, and who not, and if not, why not. And so on.” And then, Marla would stop herself, and laugh ebulliently, and reminisce about the bar in Afghanistan or some other adventure. And you would see how sad she was.
Marla was never naïve about the risks she ran in Iraq, and an entry on her Web site last summer was horribly prescient:
“A good friend of mine advised me to keep my movements minimal in the coming days, saying ‘Just think of all the work you will be able to do in three months when the situation is better because you were not killed by a bomb.’” But there was a job to be done, and nobody else to do it. “We have been working on submitting more compensation cases and encouraging the military to pay them out. In order to submit a case we have to drive out to the airport. The ride is not pleasant, military convoys passing every moment. Faiz and I hold our breath—such convoys in that area are the target of rockets and fire from the resistance….” It was while she and Faiz were passing a convoy last Saturday that the bomber struck.
What did Marla Ruzicka achieve? A great deal, but never quite enough to satisfy her. She worked with different organizations and eventually founded her own: The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), http://www.civicworldwide.org/, staffed mainly by volunteers. Over the last couple of days, glowing obituaries and tributes to Marla have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the war zones themselves. (Even the New York Daily News, which might once have seen Marla as an unregenerate leftist, called her “an all-American angel of mercy.”) But whether CIVIC can go on without her, and who actually will help those individuals and families she helped, is an open question.
As flighty as Marla sometimes seemed, and as complicated as she actually was, she drove home one simple and powerful point she never let any of us forget—a terrible, plain truth that too many politicians, soldiers and journalists tend to ignore when they dare to talk about the dead and wounded in war as statistics for history books. “Each number,” she’d say, “is a story of someone who left a family behind.”

It's funny the things that grab people's attention, and gobble up the work day. Today it was a surreal exchange of views about designing t-shirts marking the relationship between my organization and the Japanese government. It started simply enough but took a turn for the weird when someone tossed in the idea of commemorative lighters (cheap to make, useful etc) only to be shot down by someone else who thought it condoned smoking. A day later and they're still at it, firing rounds across cyberspace.
And then there's the stuff that goes off like a wet fart. Two weeks back I circulated a report to all department heads about the situation at Banda Aceh's main hospital that recommend we steer clear of that viper's pit. I've not been asked a single question about it.
Here's the report in full:

Zainal Abidin hospital is in crisis.
- Local nurses and paramedics are threatening to strike.
- In some cases basic medical assistance is not being delivered at all because of poor morale, incompetence, and a lack of access to the necessary donated supplies exacerbated by endemic corruption.
- At least two children have died needlessly at ZA in recent weeks despite the presence there of a team of French doctors, and there are persistent rumors of a third preventable neo-natal death.
- Donated medicine and supplies are vanishing from ZA storerooms to reappear in the private, for-profit clinics who charge for the drugs, and on the black-market.

STRIKE
Local newspapers are carrying stories about demoralized nurses threatening to strike if their demands are not met. Paramedics are angry, exhausted and ready to walk out.
Specifically they feel they are not being adequately paid and are angry at the attitude of many of the doctors. They perceive the doctors benefiting and enriching themselves from the relations with the foreign organizations while they themselves are being shut out.
Many doctors are being seconded as consultants to international organizations (at one point not that long ago, one of the top physicians at ZA was working as a translator for the head of mission of one of the larger organizations in BA) while others spend most of their time in their own private clinics.

PATIENT DEATHS
A seven year old girl named Baitul was recently admitted to ZA in serious condition suffering from TB contracted pre-tsunami. She may well have aspirated tsunami water as well. She responded well to three days of treatment by French doctors working in the children’s ward, including an intervention that removed large quantities of water from her lungs. By the weekend she was laughing, eating and moving around on her own accord. The French returned from their Sunday day off to find she had taken a dramatic turn for the worse.
She relapsed because the ZA nurses failed to give her the necessary injections needed to prevent water from building up in her lungs. The French team was “scandalized” to learn that donated drugs were kept under lock and key and were not being made available to the nurses. When the child began having trouble breathing, the nurses put her back on oxygen. When the oxygen bottle ran out they simply turned it off and did not replace to empty canister. The result was the child spent an agonizing night during which the oxygen levels in her blood plummeted. Despite the efforts of the French team, Baitul died 24 hours later.

In another case the same French team literally had to break their way into a locked store room in order to retrieve an incubator for a newborn premature baby. They left explicit instructions that the intubator (the tube delivering air to the infant’s lungs) was to be checked regularly through the night. When they returned in the morning the intubator was lying in the bed and the infant died a short time later. It is unclear whether the tube was deliberately removed but the doctors learned that none of the nurses has checked the child during the night.

After this incident the French physicians threatened to leave. Following an angry meeting with hospital administrators some equipment and medicine did appear in their ward.

There is also a story making the rounds that I cannot verify. It relates to a second premature baby who was placed in a donated incubator. The nurse turned the temperature inside the incubator to 70C and the child died under the most appalling circumstances. I’m told this incubator was donated from Europe and none of the instructions on the unit were written in Bahasa Indonesia.
If two children (possibly three) have died while under the direct care of the French, I invite you to imagine what is going on in other wards. For their part, the French team has returned home in the past few days traumatized and extremely upset about what was going on in ZA hospital. It is unclear whether they will return.

CORRUPTION
It is common knowledge in ZA that medicine and equipment are being sold on the Black-market, in some cases as far away as Medan. In recent weeks observers at ZA have watched stores of drugs and equipment like wheelchairs, trolleys, medical lamps and items like gastro-intestinal scopes vanish.
There are also unconfirmed reports that an entire German operating theatre has disappeared.
Witnesses report local doctors writing up extensive “wish-lists” of medical equipment for foreign donors that in many cases they have no idea how to operate and/or are already sitting un-used in their original plastic wrap in locked store rooms.
Similarly there is strong evidence that outside physicians are buying large quantities of donated medicine and equipment directly from the hospital stores in order to restock their personal pharmacies. They then charge for this medicine.
ZA administrators keep large quantities of donated equipment and medicine under lock and key and it is extremely difficult to get access to what is needed. The problem is particularly acute when the person with the key to the main storeroom goes home for the day. Thus the need for the French to break down the door.
I’m also told that in some cases impoverished family members of patients are being told that no medicine is available and are being directed to the national pharmacy down the road from ZA where they are being charged full cost for domestic brands.
COMMENTS
With the exception of the recent news reports, I cannot independently verify any of this information but it dovetails with what I personally observed there in the two months after the tsunami. The information was collected by a close friend who spent six days at the hospital over two weeks observing conditions and conducting interviews with patients and their families, the French physicians and local nurses. My source is extremely reliable, speaks Bahasa Indonesia and has many years experience in Aceh specifically and Indonesia generally.
I’ve been to ZA many times over the past five+ years. The negligence and endemic graft that are a feature of most large hospitals in Indonesia has been amplified in the case of ZA and by extension the entire provincial medical system.
ZA was allowed to decay pre-tsunami because of promises that BA would get a new hospital when the existing facility was no longer usable. There was no investment in the hospital for years prior to the tsunami: the drains in the hospital for example backed up regularly for years before the tsunami because of a lack of proper maintenance.
Even the local press, when asked about backdoor deals, graft and prevantable patient deaths at ZA, say it is back to “business as usual”. All indications are that as direct international oversight at ZA is withdrawn, the situation for patients and staff is going to get even worse.
I bring it to you because we facilitate the delivery of medicine and supplies to ZA. I believe well-intentioned donors mistakenly think that once delivered, their donations are going to find there way into competent and caring hands when in fact the opposite is often the case.
-END-

Its been an absolute whirlwind since the 31st of last month when the latest 'Big One' hit. Poured out of the house within a minute of the earthquake announcing its arrival in now-familiar fashion ten minutes past 11 in the night: headboard banging against the wall, floors undulating beneath my feet as I grab the bag sitting by the bed containing passport, money, flashlight etc. and the house plunges into darkness. A glass shatters on the floor and I bang my knees off unfamiliar pieces of furniture herding J through the living-room and into the driveway. Note to self: proper grab-bag is a must. Water, military rations, candles, both cell phones, my Motorola GP340 and some clothes.
Outside the streets are filling with people racing for the local mosque. Children sobbing, the cemetery dogs baying and a curtain of dust rising from the street. The ancient trees that line the median are wobbling like a picket fence in a wind; you can taste the fear. The radio crackles to life and now the anxiety is broadcast for all to hear.
"Bravo Foxtrot Base. This is Bravo Foxtrot one-one-zero. Come in, over."
Within minutes the lack of preparedness is clear as day. Voices cracking with emotion, the oh-so slightly distorted sounds of people crying and yelling across the bandwidth.
"Bravo Oscar Base, there's been an earthquake!"
No shit.
Mercifully the lights come on fairly quickly, bringing with it a general calm.
Both my mobiles are buzzing impatiently with a dozen text-messages from journos in Jakarta. ABC News in the States is the first to get through but I blow them off saying I've got to keep the line open for the next few minutes.
Amidst it all, Anim and the boys who share the house, J and I are perfectly calm. I'm pleased I don't have to put out emotional fires, comfort or 'be there' so I can better concentrate on finding out exactly what has happened.
(I've now subscribed to an SMS service that is supposed to alert me in real time to all earthquakes in Southeast Asia greater than 6.0. It's a measure of how far we have come that I'm not remotely interested in a 5.5 for example, which can be a nasty piece of work all on its own, especially if its shallow.)
By 23:40 I know that first readings measure the quake at 8.3 somewhere off the west coast of Sumatra. Later it'll be upgraded to 8.7 and we'll know more precisely that its was centered just off the coast of the Banyak Islands, that it caused extensive damage to the neighboring islands of Simeulue and Nias, that 1,300+ people are believe to have died - through a mathematical formula the UN employs, if you can believe this - plotting the extend of damage to individual structures with the number of people living inside.
I will do a dozen+ interviews until 2.30 am. Fortunately there's a couple of coolies in the fridge and I've got plenty smokes.
The following morning I attend the emergency meeting of the heads of agencies at the offices of the UNFPA, the 'population control' people, which has a taste of irony I can't quite fathom. Only one topic of conversation of course.
Information is starting to dribble in from the affected islands. Masood Haider, the UN's deputy humanitarian aid coordinator for Sumatra (top guy on the ground), Michele Lipner, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) and the top managers from the seven of eight largest agencies are all their.
Given the dearth of information from the coast there's actually very little concrete to say except that the previous night was proof, as if further were needed, that if the earth split beneath our feet as I type, we're all screwed.
There really is no "plan" in the event of an emergency. Even if there were, the differing agencies would squabble for turf and media coverage. Best just to plan for individual survival and leave the big picture to others. Fact is, if things went south in Aceh right now you'd pretty much have to take me at gunpoint to an outbound plane or helicopter. The instinct to remain, to push past the curtain of flames is far too strong.
I'm reduced to a snickering puddle when the head of one of the agencies describes in dramatic terms how he bolted the gate of a staff home to prevent folks from fleeing the grounds (and if the house had collapsed?) Later he bootlicks to beat Wormtongue, detailing his enormous relief at hearing Massod's "calm and reassuring" voice on the radio 30 minutes after the earthquake, urging him to use the radio in all emergencies as a salve to the huddled, fearful masses of international staff yearning for direction. Even Masood has sufficient modesty to look embarrassed.
It'll be several frustrating days before I finally land in Nias. In the interim I've been at it from dawn till late, all of us have. Lost count of the number of interviews and meetings. It's amazing to watch the 'system' wake up. Umpteen hundred ton boats arrive in Banda Aceh, Calang and Meulaboh waiting to be filled with every aid item conceive of; the UN's air service kicks in with Mi8s, Bells, SuperPumas and other makes and models of helicopter, and points Beechcraft and deHavilands, c-160s and Fokkers at the ruined runway on Nias. All must be fueled and serviced.
Many warehouses are stocked up - in some cases over-supplied with items delivered in the wake of the tsunami - so there's a rush to find out who's got what, where. For all OCHA's attempts to 'coordinate' the most effective and rapid responses are those cobbled together on the side-lines of the daily emergency meetings:
"I've got a 400 metric ton ship in the harbour leaving in 36 hours."
"We've got 350 family-sized tents... there's 5,000 family packs and 5,000 hygiene kits over here... this woman's organization has four 16-foot, motorized dinghies that can carry a ton of supplies each, might be useful in Simeulue whose capitol's port was reduced to match-sticks by 4-meter waves following the earthquake... is there room for our solar-powered water purification unit? It can produce 6,000 liters of fresh water every hour.... WFP is hauling 300 MT of food; maybe the vessels can sail together. IOM has 30 10-wheelers in Banda Aceh so we can pick-up all your freight and deliver it to the port, 30 minutes from town."
A day-and-a-half later, while I'm cooling my heels in Medan for 24 hours waiting for a UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) flight to Nias, that ship slips out and south to the epicenter.
The Nias/Simeulue situation is almost a perfect confluence of events to test the international agency’s' ability to react. On the one hand, there are enormous logistical hurdles to overcome. Roads, bridges and ports are out, there's no power, running water, the phones don't work and the local administration is sleepy and rotten to the core, overwhelmed by events and fearful of a vengeful population steeled by their hunger. The affected areas are remote islands known for surf beaches so the sea is an issue, especially now as the Westerlies throw up five-meter swells. Many survivors refuse to come out of the mountains. If you'd survived a 20-meter tsunami only to watch your house collapse in the middle of the night 100 days later in the seventh largest earthquake in the past century AND your kids are crying 24/7 because there have been 136 aftershocks in the past eight days, would you come out of the mountains or sit pretty eating bananas and sipping spring water for a few weeks?
On the flip side, there are plenty of experienced people available to help. There are lots of boats, choppers and planes. There's food, water, shelter, generators, fuel, and medical help in spades. The TNI is (mostly) playing ball - they refused some agency flight privileges and continue to insist they are the primary agency through which aid will flow - so there are fewer hurdles. The N Sumatra governor is a moron - he refused to allow aid to be shipped through the provincial capital Medan if it was going to Simeulue (Aceh) instead of Nias (N Sumatra) - but at least he is on the ground in Nias. While 630 bodies have been recovered and the smell is pretty atrocious in places, and perhaps 3,500 require varying degrees of medical assistance, it is a manageable load if you frame it against the post-tsunami situation.
If one were to use a single barometer, say, the rapid deployment of the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination group, one might get some taste of how history might judge the response. This is pulled from the website:
"Upon request of a disaster-stricken country, the UNDAC team can be deployed within hours to carry out rapid assessment of priority needs and to support national Authorities and the United Nations Resident Coordinator to coordinate international relief on-site. Members of the UNDAC team are permanently on stand-by to deploy to relief missions following disasters and humanitarian emergencies anywhere in the world."
Today, nine days after the earthquake, was UNDAC's first day in Nias and no one can explain why.