Thursday 13 May 2010
Doing something is better than doing nothing...
David Hatcher helps to erect another home for orphans at the House of Smiles Orphanage in Leogane, HaitiShelterBox Response Team (SRT) member David Hatcher (UK) is a retired Police Chief Superintendant with 37 years of police experience.
Despite nearly four decades of frontline policing, nothing prepared him for the experience he went through on his first deployment as a SRT member.
Here he records his thoughts and feelings, after returning from Haiti:
'I thought I had seen tragedy at its worst – the sadness of cot death, the suffering of those in road accidents, the grief spawned by the delivery of death messages, involvement in the strife of the 1984 miners dispute, the consequences of the enormous loss of life in the Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster, to the repeated involvement in rail crashes at Paddington and Potters Bar.
However, after 37 years of policing at the sharp end, and in the senior ranks, nothing prepared me for the experience of the dilemmas that Haiti is still going through, 3 months after that awful afternoon when the earth moved.
Out of all the aid agencies working in Haiti, I must confess to a huge feeling of pride that I was there as a representative of ShelterBox – the international charity that locals appeared to welcome more than any other, probably because it actively provides tangible help for those who have literally lost everything apart from their dignity.
Even doctors and nurses at the field hospital where we camped felt they could be more valuable as a ShelterBox worker, in spite of the lifesaving acts they perform hourly dealing with the consequences of accidents and illness that were sometimes a consequence of the disaster and sometimes just people who couldn’t acquire help for their illnesses before the earthquake occurred.
A question often posed by such medical staff was: ‘How do I become a ShelterBox Response Team member? It must be so worthwhile providing the help that you do!’
David with 17 day old Gessna - who lost his dad in the earthquake before he was born and now recieves care in a ShelterBox tented clinic.
During my time in Haiti it seemed that whatever I did made only a tiny difference to the whole situation, yet I also knew that everyone we helped was just one more step in making an enormous difference to the future wellbeing of that family for the rest of their lives.
Without the support of the ShelterBox family around the world; from donors through to those who order the goods, those who pack the boxes and the Response Team members like myself who get to do the ‘glamorous bit’, the families we help would be in the same dire situation for the foreseeable future.
I kept repeating the mantra in my head that ‘doing something is better than doing nothing’ – it was as though we were trying to swim the Atlantic but had no concept of really getting anywhere.
Of all the happenings in my life (apart from the joy of my family), nothing has come close to the pride I felt at being selected following training to become a ShelterBox Response Team member.
At last it was a role that would make a real, timely and tangible difference to the lives of others. However, in contrast I am now wrestling with the contrast of that privilege and the austerity of those I’ve tried to help – I feel even worse when I think of those for whom we will never have enough resources, but who have so much less than the rest of us.
One of the many children in Haiti helped by ShelterBox with a children's activity pack
While so far I’ve donated hundreds of hours to fundraising for ShelterBox, a few hundred more to training and preparing myself for work in the field, it’s nothing like enough to offset the suffering and relative poverty of those we’re trying to help.
One thing I know for sure is that there is nothing potentially more fulfilling than our jointly helping ShelterBox to continue the work of providing for victims of natural and manmade disasters or conflict, in whatever way we can.
No one in the chain of providing each box is more important than any other, and none of us come close to being as important as the recipients of the boxes we supply.'
