One of the last and most interesting activities of my placement before I left was helping with a massive disaster relief distribution effort for families affected by floods that swept over many villages back in July. It's taken a while for things to take off, the goods arrived months ago and have been taking up all our storage space ever since, but after lots of negotiations with the different district departments involved in the distribution things were finally ready to go.

There's a huge amount of things to consider in the distribution effort, starting with the fact that there is only enough relief items for 93 households, when over 900 households were actually affected. First we had to get the lists of communities that were hit the worst, assessed by the National Disaster Management Office, and then we had to receive the lists of households in each community, broken down by details of information such as head of household, names of all brothers and sisters and extended family, acres of crops affected and exact location of the house. Secondly we had to figure out exactly how many resources were provided and how best they could be distributed to ensure a real impact on affected families. You might think that all the stocks we had should be equally shared amongst all households, but that would mean everyone would get the equivalent of one bowl of rice, which in the situation they are in wouldn't really make uch difference!

So it was decided that 93 households would get 18 bowls of maize, 7 bowls of beans and 5 bowls of rice, 10 bottles of cooking oil, 2 mats, and 2 sleeping blanket. Then we had to figure out which households would receive the items. This is the hard part, as it has to be completely random, and it's really important not to do anything that might cause conflict within / among communities. We used a tried and tested sampling method to select the houses, and the whole disaster task force team came together to ensure it was fair and equal, as far as it could be!

It probably also sounds odd that we were distributing relief items 5 months after the actual disaster, but one thing I've learnt from volunteering with World Vision is that disaster relief is not all about rushing about in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, dealing with emergencies and handing out relief items in a super-hurry. It's also about the long-term relief efforts that are needed to help a community stand on its own two feet again, or two hundred feet in the case of communities here where community spirit is so strong and everyone works together. The real impact of the disaster in this case could not be assessed until after harvesting season, when families could really see how many crops had been ruined, and we also had to wait until after the election so that the effort could not be confused in any way with the political rallies that were going on at the time.

The whole task was a logistical challenge, with so many factors to consider - communicating to the beneficiary households to send someone to a meeting point to collect the items, figuring out how to transport the HUGE amounts of goods to each community accurately, figuring out how many bowls of maize are in one bag, and how to distribute the items without causing chaos. My Operation Impact training from working at the University certainly came in handy! We went out in two teams, and I was surprised when at one point a challenge facing one team left me in charge of the other one, and I ended up having to coordinate the whole thing! My team consisted of the head of the fire department, a very important man from the district assembly, and the National Disaster Office representative, so I felt really quite surprised when they actually followed this little young female's lead!

We were there for hours, and my brain was whizzing with mathematical calculations and attempts to communicate in the very little bits of Kusaal that I know, and I was just dreading making a silly mistake like giving out too many bags of rice to one community and not enough to another and causing a huge fight! But luckily all went smoothly, and by the end of the day we had achieved what we had set out to. The families were utterly grateful, and it was difficult to leave for the swathes of people coming to greet me and thank me. I am always acutely aware at times like this that they look to the 'white lady' and think that I am the one with the magic wand, the one that has made it all happen, which is uncomfortable because I really am not at all. But it was great to see World Vision in action like this, once again having a huge impact on the communities, and doing it in such a way that they will surely be grateful for years to come. The bigger challenge is actually working on disaster prevention and stopping the same thing from happening next year...but that's a whole other blog post!

With love from Ghana,

Em

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