Thanks to Dr. Pierre Rouzier for Sharing with Us Experiences from Haiti to the Boston Marathon Bombings

Today, we were mesmerized by the lecture given by Dr. Pierre Rouzier of the UMass University Health Services, who is also a team doctor. Dr. Rouzier shared with us, in the Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class that I teach at the Isenberg School of Management,  his work post the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake and his life-saving efforts during last year's Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, where he was serving as a sports medicine expert volunteer.

His lecture was very dynamic and his presentation was filled with photographs of the people that he worked with both in Haiti and in Boston and of those  that he met that have made these two events forever ingrained in his memory and in the way we look at the world today, which is riddled with disasters, both man-made and natural. He told us how he stayed with a woman post the bombing who told him that she did not want to die alone.

His love of people, selflessness, intellect and courage during triage and times of great stress and uncertainty, captivated us.

He is the author not only of a sports medicine book but even of a recent children's book, Henry Gets Moving,  to help children stay in shape. He spoke of poverty, of inequality, and of the PTSD that he has experienced serving in these extremely difficult disasters. He also spoke of his efforts to raise funds for the recovery in Haiti and how he bicycled last summer hundreds of miles in Iowa to raise funds for the Boston Marathon bombing victims wearing his Boston Strong t-shirt.

He also spoke about how he discovered his love of teaching and will return to Haiti to teach sports medicine this summer. His father was Haitian but immigrated to the U.S. Dr. Rouzier's dream is to build a facility in Haiti that will inspire children through sports, especially, soccer, with a sports medicine clinic, and employment opportunities for families of the young athletes.


Dr. Rouzier's humanity and humanitarianism is an inspiration for all of us. How lucky are we at UMass Amherst to have such a hero and role model in our midst.

Marking the Second Anniversary of the Haiti Earthquake

On January 12, 2012, we mark the second anniversary of the devastating Haiti earthquake, which resulted in about 300,000 lives lost, numerous injuries, critical infrastructure from roads to communication and energy lines destroyed, along with buildings and homes. And, yet, two years after the earthquake, there are still hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in tents without running water and without electricity.

Two years, and so many still have no relief or a place that they can call a proper home. Have not they suffered enough?

The Boston Globe has marked this painful anniversary through photos, which graphically show the glacial pace of recovery and reconstruction.

To mark the anniversary of this disaster, I wrote an OpEd piece arguing for more education in humanitarian logistics. It is scheduled to be published this coming Sunday in the Springfield Republican newspaper, the major newspaper in western Massachusetts.

I will be teaching a new course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare at the Isenberg School of Management beginning in two weeks and today I finished the lecture on supply chain risk management in which risk management of commercial supply chains is compared with risk management of humanitarian ones. Cooperation is critical in humanitarian logistics as is proper management of the financial funds that flow from donors.

When will Haiti rise again from the ashes?

For a very interesting segment on Haiti from the global journalist radio click here.

Disaster Politics and Operations Research

We are surrounded by politics and no organization is immune from politics.

The definition of the word politics I take from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and it includes:

1. the art or science of government;

2. the total complex of relations between people living in society.

My research group does a lot of work on disaster planning, emergency preparedness, and humanitarian operations with coverage of our most recent study being featured on newswire.com in an article entitled, Team Designs Optimal Supply Chains for Disaster Relief.

With the number of disasters growing as well as the number of people affected by disasters, the question arises as to what role politics play in disasters when it comes to the survival of citizens after disasters strike.

In a fascinating article, Disaster Politics: Why Earthquakes Rock Democracies Less, published in Foreign Affairs, Alistair Smith and Alejandro Quiroz Flores present documentation regarding earthquakes in different countries, the political structure in the countries, and the number of deaths attributed to recent disasters, and write:

In a democracy, leaders must maintain the confidence of large portions of the population in order to stay in power. To do so, they need to protect the people from natural disasters by enforcing building codes and ensuring that bureaucracies are run by competent administrators. When politicians fail to deliver -- by, for example, letting too many die in disasters -- they lose their jobs. On average, 39 percent of democracies experience anti-government protests within any two-year period. The rate almost doubles after a major earthquake (defined as one that results in more than 200 casualties). And whereas 40 percent of democratic nations replace their leader in any two-year period, between 1976 and 2007, 91 percent of them did so following a major earthquake.

The article also highlights the difference in outcomes in countries post disasters: On January 12, 2010, Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, was struck by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that caused widespread destruction and killed approximately 222,000 people. The next month, Chile was hit by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake -- approximately 500 times stronger than that in Haiti -- but only 500 people died. The difference in losses (both in terms of lives lost and infrastructure destruction, which in the case of Haiti propagates to this day) was attributed to several factors: the difference in the building codes in these two countries and the government response to the earthquakes. The difference is also in the preparation: Chile, Japan, and the United States have implemented policies that keep acts of nature from becoming massive human tragedies, while others have not (and some of the most notable ones of the latter have been non-democratic countries).

I recall when I was at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy, as organizer of the Humanitarian Logistics: Networks for Africa conference, which was "sandwiched" between (obviously, not planned) Cyclone Nargis that hit Myanmar (Burma) and the Sichuan Earthquake that hit China. There were several conferees in attendance who are well-known to the operations research community. While at Bellagio, we were told by Dr. Cosmas Zavazava of the International Telecommunications Union (whose UN-based organization also played an important role in restoring communications in Haiti after the earthquake) the difficulties that ITU had in getting its equipment to where it was needed in Myanmar because of the political situation (and he was in regular communication providing assistance while at the conference, which he deemed so important that he had to attend it).

George Fenton of the World Food Program, another invited conferee, managed to send us his presentation but was en route to Myanmar. The death toll following Cyclone Nargis was 138,000. As highlighted in Disaster Politics: Not only did the military regime do virtually nothing to help the communities worst affected it also blocked the arrival of international aid. The casualties were two orders of magnitude greater than those from Hurricane Katrina, but Myanmar’s military regime remains firmly entrenched.

We have a responsibility to educate and to inform citizens living under different political regimes that their governments must be prepared for disasters and must invest in resilient infrastructure to minimize the potential devastation. We have the knowledge to identify where to build (and how) so as to minimize risk; where to position necessary supplies in case of emergencies so that life-saving products can be delivered in a timely manner to population centers, and how to prioritize. We have the tools and techniques that can identify how organizations can team up during disasters in order to identify potential synergies so that lives are saved through cooperation rather than competition. Equally importantly, we must work to ensure that the actions of humans do not add to the potential devastation whether through climate change or inappropriate and inadequate resource allocation.

A Tribute to Thomas J. White, Co-Founder of Partners in Health

Yesterday, Thomas J. White, a co-founder of the amazing organization, Partners in Health, and a very successful businessman in Boston in the construction industry, whose childhood was very painful, died at age 90.

Today's Boston Globe has a very moving tribute about this great man, entitled: "Rich beyond counting with compassion for the poor."

According to the article:

He lived his life with but a single regret.

“I’m sorry I don’t have more money to give away,’’ he told the Globe in 2004.

What he handed out had a ripple effect beyond the immediate lives he saved, said Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College who was at the inception of Partners in Health with Mr. White, Dr. Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, and Todd McCormack.

(Dr. Kim has an undergrad degree from my alma mater, Brown University, and an MD and PhD from Harvard.)

“After a while, we tried to limit his trips to Haiti, because it pained him so much,’’ Kim said. “No matter where he was, every morning he would wake up and start his day thinking about the suffering of the poor. I have never, ever seen a person like that before, where the reality of the pain of others was with him all the time.’’

He even delivered personally to a homeless woman in Harvard Square a red wagon a day after she told him that a red wagon was what she really needed to cart her belongings around.

As we approach the one year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010, it is time to reflect. Dr. Kim's mother called Mr. Thomas J. White, a living saint.

I leave you with some words of wisdom from this exemplary philanthropist, businessman, and human being, courtesy of Partners in Health:

I think it’s important for us to live in an inclusive world. Excluding people for this reason or that is, in most cases, grossly unfair. I also think that the myth of the self-made man is exactly that, a myth. All of us are born under many conditions over which we had no control or no vote, i.e. where and when we were born, whether we were male or female, the color of our skin, our ethnicity, and our religion.

Academics, Athletics, and Haiti

The Boston Globe has a wonderful article on Vladimir Ducasse, a UMass Amherst football lineman, who is trying out on the Gulf Coast for the Senior Bowl with dreams of being selected by the National Football League (NFL). The article traces the history of this star athlete and discusses his focus and discipline in light of the earthquake and devastation in his birthplace, Haiti.

The article notes that Ducasse selected UMass Amherst, first and foremost, for its academics, and, next, for its athletics -- football. It talks about the trust that he has earned and his love and respect for the coaches as well as his abilities to concentrate on the tasks before him, given the immense distractions of the events in his home country.

We wish Vladimir Ducasse as well as his countrymen all the best as they begin to rebuild and reconstruct Haiti.