Don’t send shoes, send money. Don’t send baby formula, send money. Don’t send old coats, send money.
Nonprofit groups rarely look a gift horse in the mouth, and the relief effort in Haiti is desperate for resources. The experience of wasteful giving in the past, however, coupled with the ease of speaking out via blogs, Facebook and Twitter, has led to an unprecedented effort to teach Americans what not to give.
One particularly influential blog is being written by Saundra Schimmelpfennig, an international aid expert who once worked for the Red Cross. Schimmelpfennig’s blog, Good Intentions Are Not Enough, is attracting more hits in a day than it used to get in a month, as everyone from the US State Department to the White House seeks information about giving.
The advice appears to be reaching a tipping point — former US president George W. Bush echoed the message when he joined US President Barack Obama and former US president Bill Clinton last week to announce a new venture for the Haitian relief effort.
“I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water,” Bush said. “Just send your cash.”
Every aid worker has a favorite story about useless donations. Raymond Offenheiser, the president of Oxfam America, the US branch of the British relief group, recalled being in Bangladesh after a cyclone had killed 200,000 people and watching local women trying to make sense out of French TV dinners — “complete with croissant,” he said — that required a microwave.
“There isn’t always a lot of thought that goes into these gifts,” Offenheiser said. “The impulse is just to do something, anything.”
Water is heavy and bulky, takes up precious cargo space and requires distribution. Better to back an organization working to get emergency water systems up and running, the experts say.
Blankets have many of the same issues, requiring getting them to port, clearing them through customs, distributing them and deciding who gets them — when other organizations on the ground may have plenty of blankets already.
Another widely circulated blog post, “No One Needs Your Old Shoes: How Not to Help in Haiti,” was written shortly after the earthquake by Alanna Shaikh, an international relief and development expert working in Tajikistan. It suggested giving money, not goods; going to volunteer only if you have medical expertise and are vetted by a reputable organization; and supporting the far less immediate task of rebuilding Haiti.
The comments on Aid Watch, a blog managed by the Development Research Institute at New York University, underscored her point. One person wrote about the bewilderment of survivors of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras upon opening a box of donated high-heeled shoes, while another tells of the arrival in Congo of boxes of used toothbrushes, expired over-the-counter drugs and broken bicycles.
“The Asian tsunami taught everyone a huge lesson because the problems with aid there got so much attention and saturated the media and the Internet and Facebook,” Shaikh said. “So I do think more people are aware that there is a right way and a wrong way to donate, but at the same time, there’s a certain level where people aren’t stopping to think, they just have an impulse to help.”
Shaikh gets particularly worked up about misguided donations of baby formula.
“A woman who is breast-feeding is given a can of formula when clean water to mix it is unavailable and her baby needs the support of her immune system more than ever,” Shaikh said.
“Baby formula,” she said firmly, “does nothing for babies in the middle of a disaster and can even be fatal.”
The advice aid workers offer can sometimes seem harsh. For instance, Peter Walker, director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, blogged about his experience with earthquakes and noted that 95 percent of victims who are rescued alive from collapsed structures are rescued within the first 48 hours.
“International search and rescue teams may be great gestures of solidarity and shared concern, but they have little chance of getting to the disaster site in time to do any real good,” Walker wrote.
Offenheiser of Oxfam said he thought more policymakers and advisers were becoming aware of the inefficiency of disaster giving. He said that Clinton had spent a lot of time talking with and learning from relief agencies when he served as the UN special envoy for recovery after the tsunami, and that Gayle Smith, the National Security Council official responsible for dealing with issues of international aid, has deep experience with relief programs.
He also said that many Americans have first-hand experience with the aftermath of major disaster because so many people went to the Gulf Coast to volunteer after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“These people saw donated clothing piled three and four stories high in parking lots all over the area that was soaking wet and being consumed by mildew, and they went home and talked about what they saw,” Offenheiser said. “They saw first-hand how inappropriate some of the resources that were donated were.”
Schimmelpfennig said she had been able to track the visits to her blog — from ordinary Americans all the way to the White House.
“I was with my nephew, and we suddenly saw a jump in hits after the presidents spoke in the Rose Garden,” she said. “We worked our way backwards using StatCounter and saw that the State Department and the White House had visited the blog a couple of days before that.”
She said someone in the White House viewed one post from Jan. 13, while the State Department went through virtually every page on the site.
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