Reflections: Honduras earthquake relief mission

We drove back from Puerto Cortez to Tegucigalpa all day yesterday. That 8 hour drive gave me some time to unpack my thoughts and feelings from my first experience in immediate disaster relief, responding to a 7.1 earthquake in Honduras.

We found a group of families whose homes were destroyed by the earthquake and gave them food and other supplies that would help them through the disaster. Rescue Task Force typically responds to bigger disasters, like the 2005 tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, where there's a great need for the immediate presence of doctors and medical supplies. We didn't really know what to expect, going in, and it turned out that no one - amazingly - was in need of medical attention.

These people were very poor to begin with, so losing their home was a catastrophe. I'm glad that we were able to help in what little way that we could, and knowing what I know now I would do it all over again. But I also recognize that the help we were able to give is only temporary, and that at the end of the day, these people still have no home to return to and no resources to rebuild.

Unfortunately, this represents deeply rooted sociological problems endemic to Honduras that a relatively small outfit like Rescue Task Force can't hope to tackle. I strongly believe in the service that RTF provides, acting as first-responders to natural and man-made disasters throughout the world (they say this somewhere on their website), and I will continue to do what I can to support them, including volunteering for future missions. Even so, it's still difficult for me to see these systemic problems and know that there's nothing that RTF can do about it despite its resources, both in the form of money and volunteers with the will to help.

I'll write more about my outside-the-box thoughts on how to address these systemic problems in a later post.

Today, we will visit the orphanage.