Interfaith works where governments fail

Nepal, Haiti, Japan, Sri Lanka…  The images of earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis devastating everything in their paths; the frantic search for survivors…every year, images of a new natural disaster come through our TV screens and carve themselves into our minds. Non-governmental and faith-based organizations are often the first on the scene.

The impact of faith-based aid cannot be undervalued, in global health and development around the world, and here in the U.S. As we await Pope Francis’ visit, perhaps it is a particularly good time to consider the faith community’s role during one of the worst natural disasters in last 100-years in the U.S. Hurricane Katrina was a domestic failure of historic proportions, yet it is also a moment when faith and interfaith communities made history.

{mosads}As the first responders, if not the only responders, for weeks on end, long after the cameras went home, and even ten years later, they continue their work with survivors. Yet a Google search yields few media hits about this interfaith cooperation, and for this reason the U.S. failed to learn an important lesson from this extraordinary episode.

Hurricane Katrina forced the largest displacement of people in U.S. history: about 1.5 million people were evacuated from the Gulf Coast. These survivors were eventually spread across all fifty states. In the last week of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, killed more than 1,800 people, destroyed more than 600,000 homes, and caused more than 100 billion dollars in damage.

Churches, mosques and temples turned their buildings into bases for volunteers, warehouses for supplies, and shelters for the displaced. They distributed tons of supplies and met immediate needs in the face of catastrophe. Local churches independently established hundreds of “pop-up” shelters to house storm victims. In Mississippi, 53 percent of all shelters were operated by faith-based groups. Islamic Relief USA donated a building to replace a healthcare center that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina; it is still serving the community to this day.  In Houston, more than 2000 Muslims stood alongside other people of faith, feeding around 28,000 survivors each day at the downtown convention center.

The city of Baton Rouge doubled in size almost overnight as people ran from New Orleans. A Unitarian congregation in Baton Rouge sheltered 400 people. The pastor observed:

“Tens of thousands of American citizens, almost all of them poor and black, living in unimaginable conditions with no food and water, waited for days while evacuation buses passed them by to pick up tourists at luxury hotels . . . ”

It is those images we remember — the great government failure. Tens of thousands of frightened, helpless Americans sleeping on the concrete floor of a leaking Superdome, without food and water, corpses covered with whatever could be found. We are thankful to the media for those pictures because it is something we need to never forget.  But it is these images and stories that the media neglected to report. In one rare exception, Kim Lawton of PBS noted:

“Hundreds of faith-based volunteers rushed into the devastated areas to help with rescue operations, while others mobilized to provide desperately needed food, medicine, and shelter. Southern Baptists initially committed to provide 300,000 meals a day for the next 90 days, but a spokesman expected that number to rise to more than one million. Congregations from almost every denomination opened their facilities and became emergency shelters. National Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim groups all set up emergency relief funds and issued special appeals to aid the victims.”

Even when FEMA did finally show up, it squandered an enormous sum of 1.7 billion dollars of tax money, according to the DHS Inspector General. Waste includes a remarkable $24 million spent on unused ice, which the federal government had to then melt, wasting another $3 million. [I wish they had let the faith communities figure out how to melt it at no cost.] FEMA’s reckless waste included trailers that sat vacant for years. Perhaps that is among the reasons the region’s faith-based emergency disaster work developed into long-term collaborations.

There remain many lessons to be taken from the Katrina disaster. One of them is that houses of worship must be included as a key part of all disaster management planning. They reside in people’s neighborhoods and are connected with people who trust them. FEMA would have been better off investing in strengthening the work already being done by faith-based organizations during Katrina—as local organizations on the ground, they know the streets, the neighborhoods and the people.

Strengthening this important cooperation will go a long way in strengthening the nation by fostering productive relationships between church and state – from the White House and across federal government agencies. The interfaith movement remains the only movement that engages people of faith with one another in neighborly relations. It is going to be crucial for social cohesion as our nation continues to diversify. With the sharp increase in catastrophic weather events, strengthening grassroots networks of communities working with their neighbors is also critical for disaster coordination when, God forbid, a disaster strikes.

Mujahid is chair of the Parliament of the World’s Religions Board of Trustees.  He is president of Sound Vision Foundation, which produces the daily Radio Islam national program.