Make personal connection to victims, areas of disaster

WASHINGTON — Over the course of a three-decade reporting career, I have covered wars and earthquakes, terrorist incidents and revolutions. But I had never been caught up in a major news event as an actual participant until last week, when I was swept along in a gigantic tsunami that rolled over the coastline of southern Sri Lanka. (I was swimming when the wave hit; all of my family, on a holiday visit, escaped unharmed.)

The experience has got me thinking about how we in the West should respond to tragedies in less fortunate parts of the world. Typically, we channel our money through large aid organizations, but we have no personal relationship with the victims — and no idea where our money is going or whom it is helping, even if it is being wisely and efficiently spent.

Much of the assistance that America is providing for tsunami relief through government agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the aid organizations will get eaten up by administrative overhead or salaries for American contractors. Congress requires that nearly all aid the U.S. government provides to foreign countries be channeled through U.S. organizations, limiting the amount of money that reaches the people who need it most.

The work the aid organizations do is important, and there is probably no other way of getting large amounts of humanitarian relief to huge numbers of people. But their efforts can and should be supplemented by other, more personal networks built around direct ties between communities here and communities in the disaster-affected areas. That way we can associate names and faces with the people we are trying to help, and have a built-in accountability mechanism to track what happens to our money.

In my own case, establishing such ties is fairly simple. When I think about the tsunami, I think not about the generic TV images of waves crushing everything in their path but of the fisherman in Weligama who guided me and my brother to safety. I think of cries and screams coming from waterlogged houses. I think about the women who came running toward me, distraught, their arms outstretched, shouting something in Sinhala that I did not understand. I think of the hundreds of people who have lost their lives and of a village that has been destroyed.