Pakistan: Can’t we do more?

10 June 2009 ISLAMABAD -- It’s frustrating to sit in an air-conditioned office while 150 kilometers away people are crowded dozens to a room in the simple homes of generous but poor compatriots. To sleep in a comfortable bed while families lie under open skies for lack of shelter, their children kept awake all night by mosquito bites. I know CARE and other humanitarian agencies are doing everything in our power to get help to Pakistan’s millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs), but it still seems like too little, too slow.

I visit CARE’s warehouse here in the capital. Most of the relief items in stock have already been distributed, and we are desperately seeking funds to replenish them. Seeing the half-empty storage space brings home the challenges of addressing an emergency of such vast scope. The few remaining boxes of kitchen sets, hygiene kits, water canisters and mosquito nets are concrete reminders of the urgent human needs. But packages are not people.

I am anxious to go to the sites where IDPs have taken refuge – chiefly among host families and communities, but also in tented camps. The sheer scale of this disaster is hard to imagine, and the written reports from our colleagues in northwestern Pakistan can’t begin to capture what these people are suffering. I want to meet them for myself, shake their hands, and try to understand what they are going through.

But for now, as reports of ongoing violence continue to cross my computer screen, I’m not going anywhere. This weekend a suicide bomb struck in Islamabad, just 3 km. from the CARE staff residence where I am staying. Debris flew across a wall into the yard of a local colleague. Luckily he and his family were out at the time.

Our security officer, Khalid, is very strict about limiting staff movements – trips out of town are out of the question, for now. “A dead aid worker is of no use to anyone,” he says with a wry smile. In any case, I can accomplish more here at headquarters, helping get the financial and administrative details in place as quickly as possible for a huge logistical effort. Better to let the local staff and partner agencies, who know the terrain and can keep a lower profile, do the work on the ground.

It’s strange to be so close to such a monumental catastrophe, and yet so far removed. I can only hope that people around the world feel what I do: an urgent need to help our neighbors in need, whether they’re in the next town or on the other side of our little planet.

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