#10 A Word About the Red Cross

I really don't want to be a complainer. Ok...now you know that I plan to complain. (Here it comes) But I had to write this before I go off to Baton Rouge, to put some of what I have and will write about in perspective. There is a word I would like to mention in regard to the Red Cross. The word I would like to stamp...by hand, on every article item and form and some of the staff of the great and powerful OZ...I mean....Red Cross.... is "antique"." Antique" about sums it up. I read the word in a recent article I came across in The New York Times, recounting the recent ejecting of the Red Cross from a Georgia shelter, due to ineptitude. I couldn't agree with it more.

The Red Cross is a lumbering dinosaur, where Luddites abound, knuckles are blithely dragged and much like most of the administration presently in Washington, where the principles of Darwin could never be proved.

Lets start with this little revelation: All processing at the RC is done by hand and on paper forms....and I mean everything. As I have told you before: carbon paper is involved......excuse me while I go choke on that one more time. Let us now all have a moment of silence for the forests that have been eradicated in order to stock the Red Cross with once and future paperwork. Take your time.

Don't get me wrong, not that you could, there are computers in the place. However, they are seen for the most part, only on the desks of the staff, for their own mysterious use. No "client" or volunteer processing that I have seen, is done on a screen with a keyboard. Nor does anything resembling an intelligent design..(hic), include a template or database.

Passing the many idle, ancient PCs, I am sure they are occasionally used for looking up vital information, but a nagging sense of reality in the form of colored documents filled in by hand that virtually carpet the offices, almost forces me to suspect that some of the old clunker PCs, see more solitaire games than interfacing.

Oh I take it back...sort of. In the Greater Los Angeles intake building on Wilshire Blvd, where upwards of 1000 of the current California total evacuees of approximately 1600 have been processed, there is one computer that gets regular use. It is old. That one computer, is used by volunteers, Some of whom, are not what even my long dead grandmother would call "proficient". Their job is use this one computer to search on-line for the records of all evacuees who come in with no identification, so that they can be properly processed. It takes forever.

In the case of my personal processing experience, it has worked out to about 2 clients in 8. You do the math, I still count on my fingers.

Once the ever so long and large first form...the one with the unmentionable disposable part that starts with "c", is laboriously filled out by hand by a volunteer interviewing a client, the volunteer then hands that form to a second volunteer, who's job it is to also file the oddly shaped c-copied pink section of the first form in a small worn box, with small, frayed, paper, alphabetically tabbed separators. Did you get all of that? Me neither.

That volunteer, when notified by a third volunteer, hands the form to a fourth volunteer who then walks around the room calling the name of the hapless client who may have gone outside for a smoke. When the client is found, he, she or they, are walked over to another room, where they sit at a table with a stack of forms, with a fifth, and possibly a sixth volunteer.


Volunteer six then goes over form #1 all over again, just to be sure volunteer one did it correctly. Vol. six then proceeds to ask the client many more questions, and fill out many more forms. All by hand. Housing, medical and a few more that I can't recall just now, or would like to forget.

At the end of the large form, form #1, there are two places to sign. One space is if you want your private information to go to FEMA, the other is to acknowledge that the information contained in the form is accurate.The volunteer filling out the form signs on behalf of the Red Cross.

Note: FEMA is a part of the Federal Government. The Red Cross is not. If you are an illegal alien, and have signed the FEMA release section without being fully informed of who exactly FEMA is, then the government now has all of your personal information. Including where to find you. Few volunteers will fully inform you of that. Few volunteers know.

When all possible permutations of forms have been duly filled out, vol. six then walks the paperwork over to an office called, "the bank", seats the client outside, and delivers the paperwork which consists of the first gigantoid hard form folded, which is then used as an ersatz folder to contain the rest of the forms. How ingenious. If you are a monkey. Or perhaps if this was 1850.

The folder/form with all of the paperwork therin, is then placed in a metal tray. That operation involves lifting up all of the other ersatz, paper-filled folders with one hand, or two if you must, putting the new one at the bottom of the tray, and then replacing the rest of the e-folders,("e" is for "ersatz", get it?), back on top of the first, so that the folders will be handled in order. Woof.

The actual money giving is pretty fast. once the "bank" officer, who is a staff member, gets the file they review it for accuracy. Hopefully the "bank officer", was a professional decoder in their last life, as not all handwriting is legible. After all is confirmed, the client is brought in and given a debit card with a set amount of dollars, determined by the number of family members on that first form. Money. Cool. Besides their old life back, just what they wanted.

At that point, if medical aid is needed, the client is walked over with some of the first papers filled out to the Nurse's station, where more questions will be asked, more forms will be filled out, appointments will be made, and housing will be found.

Although things seem to go fairly quickly at our office, riots and near riots have broken out at shelters with the waiting, from what I have read and heard. People with too much time on their hands start to talk among themselves about what might be going on during the wait.

Think of the old game "post office", where one player whispers information into the ear of the next person, who whispers into the ear of the next...well...you've got the idea. Now think of that on a large scale, only the players are disaster victims who have lost everything but the clothes on their backs.

The evacuees are tired, stressed and depressed. Not all are well educated. They are all however, in a beureaucratic maze that they can't begin to find their way through alone, much less understand. It is supremely frustrating. There is a shortage of trained volunteers, emphasis on the word, "trained", and believe it or not, a shortage of money. One day, they might be us. Lets hope something changes before then.

Did I forget to mention, if a volunteer somehow fills out a form incorrectly, they are supposed to tear it up and start over again? Oddly, there is a continual shortage of forms. Loads of recycling materials though.

The Red Cross should take a page from IKEA. You know, the giant Swedish home furnishing store who somehow manage to take your order upstairs and get it downstairs without someone having to walk it there. The only paper a client or staff sees at IKEA, is the receipt at the end.

So..... what happens to all of these forms you ask? Didn't think about it yet did you? Think about it. Take your time. Are your eyes getting wider by the minute at the probability? That's right. They are filed. By hand. Miles of files. All hand written, some difficult to read. All involving carbon paper copies. They are also mis-filed, they are also lost. there is no backup system. Take a minute to get your breath back, as at this point you are either stunned, stupified, or laughing your self into a pile on the floor.

I will have to guess what happens next, as I don't actually know, and haven't gotten around to asking yet. I believe, back in some room, somewhere computers have been invented, all of the mountains of handwritten pages are somehow deciphered by some poor lost mole and entered into some obscure database that few will ever be able to find again.

The doing of this must take entire careers. Entire lifetimes for that matter. Legions. The Red Cross headquarters must be filled to the brim with handwritten folders, notes and other archaic, traditon-bound paperwork. No one had better light a match in the joint.

On one hand, the agency is completely dedicated to helping victims of disaster. Volunteers are for the most part accurate and empathetic. Staff is overworked and underpaid. From what I have seen first hand, Everyone truly does do their best. Money goes to who it should go to. People are helped.

On the other hand, could someone please call the Red Cross and let them know that we have passed the turn of the century? Oh, and could you also mention to them, that its the 21st century, not the last one?


Best,

Lisa