Swimming Pigs and Hurricanes
When I mention ‘The Bahamas’ what are the first things that come to mind? I’m guessing it is probably white sandy beaches, hot Caribbean sun, large beach resorts, beautiful sunsets and swimming pigs. Certainly friends and colleagues could not believe it when I said that work would be taking me to The Bahamas for a month during winter.
But the work that was taking me to this normally sunny paradise was Hurricane Dorian. On 1st September 2019 the Hurricane made landfall on the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama in The Bahamas. It was the joint strongest Atlantic hurricane to ever make landfall and it left absolute devastation in its wake.
The main city on Abaco island, Marsh Harbour, had been virtually wiped out. Every building was affected, whole neighbourhoods had disappeared and much of the population had been evacuated. One can only imagine the trauma experienced by those who didn’t evacuate.
The aftermath on Grand Bahama was still severe but was, at first, less obvious. Whilst some areas did experience destruction similar to Marsh Harbour, in other areas the majority of buildings still stood. However, though many homes looked fine from the outside, they had been severely damaged internally by the widespread flooding and required the whole interior of the house to be gutted. In other locations, some people’s homes suffered only minor damage but they may have lost their livelihoods or the cars on which they depended for their livelihoods. Even less apparent was the psychological toll on people on the island. Far fewer people had evacuated when Dorian hit; they sheltered through the storm in their homes, witnessing the destruction of their communities. The trauma of this could be seen several months after. Undeniably, every single person on the island had been affected by the Hurricane but everyone was affected in subtly different ways.
As part of the international humanitarian response, I was deployed by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to provide Information Management support to the Financial Assistance programme that was established as part of the response.
The programme provided money to those affected by the Hurricane, in some form or other, to support them through the aftermath of the crisis and to help them to recover their livelihoods. Financial Assistance programmes like this give people choice and flexibility to best respond to their own needs. It is more dignified and empowering than just providing goods in-kind, as the decision about what a person needs is made by the person themselves, and not by anyone else. To hear more about financial assistance programmes you can watch this video.
My role was to help enable this to happen by ensuring all the necessary bits of information were in the right place, at the right time. Without going into all the convoluted detail of the many, many Excel databases I was managing (it really wouldn’t make for the most riveting reading!) here is an outline of the different stages we went through to get the financial assistance to those that needed it:
Registration
- People registered with the Red Cross, in person at a designated registration place. They gave us information about themselves and about the impact the Hurricane had on them.
Identification
- The registration data collected was then used to identify people who were eligible to receive assistance.
Verification
- Those identified as eligible were checked against the rest of the data to ensure that they weren’t duplicated and that only one person from any one household was selected.
Distribution
- Pre-distribution preparations were made: the cash cards that were going to be used for the distribution were assigned to a specific individual; the physical and digital tokens needed to link the individual to the card were made; individual receipts for people to sign to confirm receipt of a card were prepared — all this was to ensure the correct card was given to the correct person at the correct time.
- We then contacted those who were eligible and invited them to a distribution of the cash cards (at this point just the cards were distributed with no money on them yet)
Reconciliation
- After distributing the cards we checked all the digital forms against the tokens and signed receipts to make sure everything was in order.
Encashment
- Lastly, all the necessary information was shared with the financial service provider, who would then load money onto the cards ready for use.
As you can see, it is a meticulous process: at each stage there are particular bits of information that need to be processed to enable the next stage. If, at any of these stages, the information is recorded wrong, lost or incorrectly processed the result could be that someone in need receives no support at all — so nothing too scary or anything……!
But on the flip side when it does go well it is super powerful and has a big impact. But don’t just take my word for it, this is the reaction of a couple straight after receiving the financial assistance:
While I didn’t make it to the swimming pigs during my time in The Bahamas I did indeed see some beautiful beaches and can’t deny there being a fair bit of sun. But obviously, none of this matters to a hurricane. Wherever you are in the world, after a disaster strikes there will always be people in need, and working to support these people is what, undoubtedly, I will remember the most from my month in The Bahamas.
