Sidelined - Marc

Barcelona, Spain
It was a mad scramble from the airport to the Chinese consulate in Barcelona. I had minimal time to get passport photos taken, find an internet café (to download a copy of my hotel reservation- which hadn’t arrived prior to my flight from Italy), and find the embassy. But, the next thing I knew I was in the queue……waiting, standing on the street for exactly 2hours 20 minutes before I was in front of an official. An official who promptly told me I needed to apply for my visa in my home country. He said that Beijing was constantly changing the guidelines and they could not help me. It mattered not what I said, the answer was “I cannot do here.”

I had complete confidence in Stefanie Chang, who would be first in, and John Hancock who would join her in the first week. Who better to lead the assessment, what better opportunity to follow the HODR model and have them step up into a leadership role. But how difficult it was to be sidelined, not there in the thick of it. A weeklong sail around the Mediterranean with Ian, a HODR alum from Peru and Bangladesh, would have to do.

Boston, MA
So, without a Chinese visa in hand I returned to the USA after having been away for 10 months (again). The plan was for me to use a visa expeditor for my application in Washington, DC whilst I attended our scheduled HODR June meetings. Me-mum met me in Boston and happily the two of us were welcomed at Tom Taylor’s (TTT) house. As much as I wanted to already be in China, it was great to be with the HODR team as the conversation formed ideas helping to shape our organization.

You know those scenes in the movies where the actor seems to stand still and the depth of field of the backdrop changes, almost as if it is rushing forward? Where everything looks roughly the same, but really, everything has changed? That was me in the front room of TTT’s house. I had a phone in my hand and my visa expeditor was on the other end of the line. He was telling me my visa had been rejected! He said, “your employer is H. O. D. R. what is that?” Without waiting for an answer he went on “you see right now it is a very sensitive situation in China” and the rest became a blur of words as my head spun with the implications. Rejected? #@&%, oh S%^&, that’s bad, really bad.

How do you get around that? Sidelined, again (maybe even relegated to an observer watching via youtube!).

David Campbell (DC) and I had daily skype calls with Stef and John and within the first 2 weeks a couple of things became apparent: 1. If we were to operate a HODR program in China the volunteers would be predominately (if not exclusively) Chinese. 2. The only way we could operate would be with approval, on some level, from the government. The first item, personally, took a little time to adjust to. It was hard for me to think of an international deployment without someone from Ireland or the UK or New Zealand or Cameroon or Canada able to join. I could rationalize it out by thinking of our volunteer base in Biloxi consisting of mainly Americans, so it seemed appropriate that an event in China is filled with Chinese. I had numerous conversations with HODR alum and even current volunteers in Project Cedar Rapids and they all felt that it was not an issue. But, I still turned it over and over. The second item was more problematic, access was elusive. Even the ability to determine who could give us permission for access was a mystery. Stef and John had meeting after meeting (unusual style for HODR, but these were unusual circumstances!) and finally hit upon a scheme of partnering with a Chinese NGO that had permission to operate. We would operate under their umbrella thus avoiding the need for a separate approval to be bestowed upon HODR. Seemed easy enough.

In China the team worked at local access and in the USA we pondered my visa issues. We made a trip to a local Chinese restaurant to have them decipher the characters written on my original application. It was here over a yummy dim-sum buffet (acclimatizing?) that we realized I hadn’t been rejected – I just hadn’t been approved! The embassy made a very deft maneuver; they sent my application back with no visa and the explanation was that I needed to apply in my home consular district. This sounds plausible until you talk to the visa experts, who tell you they had never heard of this. The experts say they fulfill applications for all 50 states. We thought the visa bureau had singled me out because I listed my employer as HODR and international disaster response personnel were not needed or wanted in Sichuan. If they want to shuffle me off to someone else – then fine. I will re-apply to my “home consular district” in Chicago. I found a helpful expeditor in based in Chicago and sent my application off with a few changes. 1. I was no longer flying to Chengdu (the largest city near the epicenter) now my flight only took me to Beijing. 2. I no longer had a reservation to stay in Chengdu, now I was booked in at a hostel in Beijing. 3. I no longer was applying for a 1 year multiple entry visa, now it was a 30 day single entry. 4. My employer was listed as Hands On as opposed to HODR (a little more obscure when you do a Google search!). With fingers crossed DC and I continued to skype with Stef and John daily to hear of their efforts.

Palo, Ia
It was a hectic time as I made a quick trip to Project Cedar Rapids where I stumbled around in an unfamiliar environment (USA HODR deployment!) and attempted to be of assistance to Ops Dir. Bill Driscoll, Jr. It is difficult to be in the middle of so much destruction but also moving to be around so many people motivated to help, it is the same world over, disaster after disaster. It was during my 1st 24hours in Palo that I received confirmation of my Chinese visa. Hurray!!! Off the sidelines!

Beijing, China
Stef and John set up a flurry of meetings for my 2 day stay in Beijing and I was fortunate to have Stef join me. We learned in the Philippines that without on the ground experience the meetings are not as productive. Within 2 hours of my flight landing I was meeting with the Director of Social Science Institute at Beijing University, Madame Zhang. It was my introduction to the difficulties faced by Stef and John for the past 2 weeks. In the first 4 minutes it was evident that she was unwilling (or unable, but I think more the prior) to help us, she didn’t even make eye contact (ostrich syndrome?). After a rather futile 30 minutes we excused ourselves and left for a dinner meeting.

Happily, the next two days were filled with great meetings and opportunities for partnerships, so much so that Stef left Beijing 1 day early to join a team on one of their assessments in Sichuan. It was with high spirits that I flew from the country's capital into the hard-hit province of Sichuan (along with the world’s tallest man – who was coincidentally on my flight. At 7’9’’ when he stooped in the aircraft his shoulders touched the ceiling!).

Sichuan, China
The devastation was as complete as any I have seen anywhere. Most of the homes/buildings are made of cement block or brick and the earthquake had been strong enough and long enough to knock almost all of them down. Those that remained were so badly damaged that they were no longer suitable for habitation. It was much like Pisco except not adobe structures and much like Sawit but on a more massive scale. The hillsides suffering from quake driven landslides looked like a huge hand had dragged its fingernails down them to scrape the vegetation away exposing the bare sandy soil underneath The asphalt roads were not too bad, but the more common cement roads were a complete mess, broken, upheaved, and somewhat passable in a bone jarring way. I walked among the residents of Wudu village and was moved by their spirit, their resiliency, their willingness to laugh. They had started to pick themselves up, to act on their own behalf, not waiting for someone to do for them. They had been told they would not receive a placement in a relocation camp, they would instead get 2,000 RMB to build a transitional shelter. They acknowledged that the help we offered had value.

But, the optimism carry over from the Beijing meetings was short lived. The roller-coaster ride that HODR had been on for 5 weeks resumed (I was just added to the car) as the assessment that Stef returned from was another dead-end. The same issues continued to surface even with willing Chinese partners: 1. Local government unwillingness to yield access for our model. 2. Local government unable to see value in our starting point service.

The other observation was………the response of the government.

Again, I have never seen anything like it. It is now 58 days after the event and the government has built 1.64 million (MILLION) temporary housing units! We viewed one prefabricated relocation community that had to contain maybe 6,000 units! But they are not all huge cities on flat open spaces – they were also found in very rural hillside areas, tucked into a recently flattened space accommodating 150 units. The technique is common to China, they house their construction workers and coal miners like this. It is steel framed room with a prefabricated wall and roof of Styrofoam insulation sandwiched between corrugated metal. They have a door and windows and are wired for electricity. They build them in rectangular blocks where they share common sidewalls. The blocks are all laid out with cement walkways, drainage, and communal latrines with running water nearby. You could see the work at various levels of completion, ongoing everywhere. Impressive, mighty impressive.

I had 3 meetings at the village level. At each one of those meetings I was told that the central government had issued a new mandate to “collectivise the homes.” The individual farmers will be moved to central, high-rise, apartment style homes. This would be a better use of the land and would allow the gov’t to have tighter control over the construction techniques used in the rebuilding.

It is not because of the government’s ability to respond, nor its plan to centralize, but because of its proclivity to both welcome assistance and deny it that we have decided to not deploy. We have found an environment that is not conducive for the type of program that HODR can offer. I honestly believe that we can morph a HODR deployment into anything we want it to be. I feel open to the possibility that a HODR deployment may not look like anything we have ever created before, but the at the core there are two things that must exist:

1. people in need must be served
2. HODR provides a stable platform on which volunteers can perform service

In this case I do not feel we can provide that platform. I fear that at some point a ‘higher-up’ official would take notice, ask questions we could not supply the proper authorization for, and then summarily ask us to pack up and leave. That is not a risk we can take, so we will sit this one on the sidelines.

Marc