RUMFORD – Scott Christiansen didn’t work among the dead and homeless in Sri Lanka. He didn’t feed the hungry or minister to the sick as a result of December’s earthquake and tsunami that killed multitudes in Southeast Asia.
What he did do, though, was just as important.
“When someone thinks of someone going overseas to do humanitarian work, they think of a doctor helping a child. I was one of the people who organized all the things and people who supported that doctor,” he said. “We did all the things that aren’t heroic.”
The 44-year-old husband and father of four from Milton Plantation worked 14- to 16-hour days from a small office in the Indian Ocean island’s capital, Colombo. There, as second in command for the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, he helped the relief effort begin its shift from a disaster mode to one of rehabilitation. The agency was established by the Seventh-day Adventist Church to provide humanitarian relief and welfare, and community and institutional development.
Christiansen’s work was to devise plans and proposals for building homes, while getting tents to those who still had no place to go. He also addressed water contamination issues and many day-to-day crises, such as finding places for people with tuberculosis to get treatment. The treatment centers were destroyed by the waves, and mixing infected people with others would spread the disease.
“We had serial crises,” he said.
Once, he and others in the agency expected planeloads of tents, food, blankets, cooking kits and other emergency goods. Instead, they got a shipment of a particularly powerful antibiotic.
That required additional documentation, extremely sensitive handling and dozens of hours to document it so it could go to the proper place, he said. The cyclone of activity included people of different nationalities who had different perspectives on how something should be done.
Oftentimes, Christiansen said his role was to build consensus among volunteers of differing cultures. He was one of only two Americans working out of the ADRA office. The rest came from Europe. Some, he said, would want to get a particular kind of aid out to victims immediately, then do the proper paperwork later, while others wanted all the proper documentation before going ahead with the aid.
“We’d sit down and discuss such and such needs that needed to be done. There was a lot of diplomacy and consensus building,” he said. “It took an outsider to switch from disaster to rehabilitation.”
He worked in an ADRA office that prior to the tsunami had a staff of four. After the disaster the staff had grown to about 40, not including medical staff, volunteers and counselors helping those assisting the sick and dying to cope with what they were seeing
Finding counselors and flying them in was crucial to the humanitarian effort, too, he said.
“The people who actually worked in the field had seen bodies all over the place, hanging from trees. They needed and were getting trauma counseling. If you don’t help the people who responded, you lose them, literally,” he said.
Christiansen said he saw little of Sri Lanka. His quarters were only a couple of hundred feet from the office, and the long work days left little time for anything but sleep.
On the 26-hour flight from Boston to Colombo, he got a chance to learn about the Sri Lankan people, he said.
“They are nice people, accommodating, orderly and friendly. When you are in their country, you are treated as guests,” he said. “They are a society that has respect for individual rights.”
Although he was exhausted from the intensity of his two weeks in Sri Lanka, he said he’s glad he went.
“Man, did I work. But it worked out,” he said.
Christiansen returns to his job as head of the Fractionation Development Center, a spinoff of the River Valley Technology Center.
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