DISASTER TEAM SCATTERED BY DISASTER
December 20, 2005

A team of Tulane graduate students, in top photo, evacuated after Hurricane Katrina to a convent in Italy to continue their research. They are, from left, Adam and Jackson Papendieck, Jenny Wu, Leila Oliveira, Isabel Raposo, Simone Silva and Nathan Morrow, program officer. Below, the historic convent, located near Rome.

As everyone in New Orleans today can tell you, it's crucial to prioritize disaster management efforts when resources are slim. But what do you do if your team, which is dedicated to helping international aid agencies prioritize their efforts to manage foreign disasters, is scattered to the four directions by a hurricane? Reunite in Italy, of course.

Katrina hit New Orleans two years into a four-year grant for increased collaboration between Tulane University and World Vision, an international Christian relief organization. A small team of Tulane graduate students, under the guidance of disaster management expert Nancy Mock, had been working with programs in Mozambique and Angola, Africa, to develop a Geo-Spacial Warning Information Surveillance and Response System that would gather emergency needs information to assist in program planning.

They have a particular interest in disaster-related food shortages, hunger and starvation. Using that knowledge, Mock’s team helped World Vision target areas of poverty and hunger after the tsunami hit Southeast Asia early this year.

“We’ve been working hard to strengthen our relationship with groups like World Vision,” says Mock, associate professor of international health and development at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. “That they would come through for us, to continue to support this research in such a novel way after our own natural disaster, is proof of the value of these relationships.”

Nathan Morrow is the program officer for the USAID institutional capacity building grant that supports Mock’s research and the relationship building with World Vision. Soon after Katrina hit he began receiving e-mails from the students who had worked on the project seeking a central place to keep working. Morrow’s wife is affiliated with a 16th-century Franciscan convent just outside of Rome that often hosts non-profit groups for workshops and retreats. Within days, arrangements were made to host the students at the convent at a reduced cost. By early October, the team had regrouped al Italia.

“One of the biggest challenges in these type of emergencies is that people working on research projects are either scattered or hired to work on the disaster, so you lose your team,” Morrow says.

Members of the Tulane team include Isabel Raposo, Adam Papendieck, Jenny Wu, Leila Oliveira and Simone Silva. Papendieck, who recently completed a master’s of public health at Tulane, says their Italian evacuation made working together “better than it ever could be, because we had no distractions. We had the opportunity to meet with people from the World Food Program and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, both based in Rome, to share ideas and information with them.”

According to Morrow, the ever-hospitable Romans liked this solution so much that they might continue to fund space for researchers whose work has been threatened by both natural and man-made disasters.

-- Madeline Vann

Return to the Tulane home page