Disaster Relief & Support

The Second Year Is the Hard One

Attention arrives with a disaster and leaves well before the recovery does. Immediate relief — shelter, water, food, medicine — matters enormously, and it is the part that gets funded. What follows is harder to photograph: a school without a roof, a workshop without tools, a family without papers. Support that stops at the first month has done a third of the job.

What This Work Involves

• Immediate relief — shelter, clean water, food and medical support in the first days.
• Community response — working through people already on the ground, who know the place and are trusted in it.
• Recovery — restoring the buildings, tools and services a community needs to work again, including the ones that carry its heritage.
• Staying — a presence past the point at which the news moves on.