Dinesh: Reconstruction after the Tsunami 2004

When the Tsunami hit on the 26th of December 2004, Dinesh was taking some relaxed time close to one of the places where the disaster happened. After the first panic in the relief phase, coordination was necessary to start the rebuild.

And after a few months many people who were in the relief mode had settled down and long-term rehabilitation needed to be organized.
At this moment in time some coastal organizations of fishermen asked Dinesh and his friends to help out. There were lots of local groups, but there were lots and lots of other people from everywhere who had launched themselves in the Tsunami areas as well, because of their expertise in some area. So in the first few months after the Tsunami happened, Dinesh and friends built a portal to show Who’s doing What and Where in the open source platform Pantoto, which they had developed before. It wanted to contribute to the re-coordinating of the rehabilitation work.
One of the issues they ran into was the fact that very few volunteers on location knew how to handle the platform and for it to be useful reports had to be written, edited and uploaded everyday.

There was a lot of potential for somebody to make an impression. And, very important, a lot of money was dedicated to the Tsunami disaster. A number of international agencies, which specifically had a handle on this money, were quite interested in this precedent to profile themselves.

However, because the portal was open source, some of the more institutional organizations had difficulty with trusting the Pantoto platform Dinesh and friends had built. Dinesh argues that his team believed that one does not only want to show organizations, but also an individual or group of two that contributes to the rescue. To be acknowledged when being part of a rescue or building up effort is for all involved important, not only for NGO’s but for individuals as well.

A few months later, when the rebuild phase was getting into consolidation mode, the large Non Governmental Organizations had obtained a lot of money by that time from all over the world. Faced with the need for coordination, but also faced with the need for establishing their own reputation towards their own funders, the large NGO’s refused to collaborate in such a portal anymore.

Their identity and their presence in the region were at stake. So they all went to their head offices with a request to build such a coordinating portal and to build it within their own frameworks. As a result of the abundance of money they had received, they all made their own portal in which they only presented their own work and effort with the purpose to satisfy their own sponsors and funders in the first place. The primary thing was to tell the world and your particular funder what you are doing, independent of what other people do. You don’t want to potentially relate to the same funders or make them compare. You actually try to capsule it in a way that the portal will say what you would want it to say.

Even in times of crisis reputation building is very important, more important than collaborating in order to solve the crisis, so it seems argues Dinesh. On the long term NGO’s have an identity. It’s not about how much work the coordinator did with others, but it’s what they are going to say about themselves.

A portal can now say “we are doing this, this, this and this”. It will not be with reference to anybody else. Here Dinesh delineates relief versus rehabilitation. He didn’t see any of these kinds of attitudes during the relief process. People are dying, people are hurt, houses are falling down and people don’t have anywhere to go. They need to be rescued. But now it was already four months ago that the Tsunami happened and it is merely a thing in memory for most. So now the rehabilitation has a prediction from four months to two and a half years. People are settled in. Then it’s about whether we build a house for you or for the hooker. Maybe that we propose that building ten thousand houses is a good idea. This kind of thing, this is where all those politics of presence come in.

Dinesh and his team decided that because of these developments it did not make sense anymore to provide a portal for all since its capacity to show effort and deeds done had seriously been jeopardized by the NGO’s will to primarily show their own presence at the rehabilitation places in which they were involved.

Having gathered so much information already they decided create a location-based tool that would retrieve all information of all involved other portals, national and international press and other Internet sources to gather and present ‘all that mattered to a specific place’. This location-based tool also provides the same place with all the different names that it has in the variety of international and Indian languages. When the rebuild phase was over and the NGO’s needed to create solid archives of all that happened, this tool was used regularly because it provided a comprehensive overview of all that was written about specific places.

Dinesh argues that it is very hard to say that a system can be used during the relief; maybe personal calls, cell phones. It’s a loose network at such a time. If you can anticipate crisis, like no rain and something else, you can work on these issues.

“But something like a Tsunami; you don’t even know where it hits, you don’t know how wide it will be, how many miles. I can’t imagine any anticipated coordination to stimulate redundancy and all that. And it’s a very emotional thing you know. Some way that the Tsunami hit, it was slowly flooding, makes a big difference on how rushed you want to be in offering this relief thing. So I wouldn’t say I know anything, at least not for this kind of thing.”

View full transcript including film fragments here
Hereunder the transcript in text.