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ricardo_vargas_2024_05_13_crisis_rain_en.mp3
Hi everyone, here is Hikaru Vargas, and this is the 5 minutes podcast. Over the past few days, several people asked me what my opinion is. What is my take and what I have to add to help people with the dramatic crisis in the South of Brazil, with the floods. So, for those who are not familiar with the situation, we had a massive rainfall in the Southern part of Brazil and the rivers and the lakes went up sharp. Just to give you an idea, 9 out of 10 industries in the region are not operating the airport in the capital of the South state of Rio Grande do Sul is closed with, you know, with aircraft under the water, you see the whole historical city of Porto Alegre with more than 5 meters of floods, hundreds of thousands of people suffer hundreds of people. And I want to share with you three pieces of advice. I lived this for five years at the time at the UN handling crisis, and this is an area in which I had a lot of experience. I just want to share this, and most of what I will say now is targeted to the authorities, to the police forces, to the volunteers, to understand what is a priority. So, let me start with my advice #1. It's pointless today to discuss who is guilty or why we didn't prepare for that ten years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, or last year. This will not recover the lives and this will not reduce the level of the water. This is important, and it is critically important to understand what happened. It's not the right time. Every time I watch the news and people are trying to speculate what happened, this only helps those sitting in a comfortable coach in another area of the country or of the world who are keen to find someone to punish, to justify that tragedy. But we need to be pragmatic; when you are facing a crisis, the only thing that the governor, the mayor, and all authorities should think about now, as of today, is how I can reduce the current damage in terms of lives, in terms of well-being and in terms of assets, this is the only thing that matters. So right now, how can I evacuate people? How I can bring people to safety, and how I can make sure that they have food for the next day, that they have the basic health if they are injured, and the basic conditions of life. As of today, we are not thinking about how they will return to the normal life and there's no, it's just that how you remove them from the extreme risk to a shelter where you will have time to think what can be done without losing more lives, and this. And This is why, for example, when you have a war or a displacement of people, you create refugee camps, and these refugees that we call in Portuguese abrigos, this is where you move people to, for example, it can be a church, it can be a school, it can be a gymnasium and. So you move these people to a safe shelter, you give people food, you give people these basic things, and you give people the security for them to stay safe in this place. And this drives me to the second piece of advice. Those who are fragile will become extremely fragile at this moment, the elderly people. Young females, children, and in this type of crisis, what happens many, many times, we see two types of behavior. The first one is the volunteer behavior, it's extremely powerful, the power of the volunteers, the people going to help, going to cook and this. You know, moving from a different state to help and all this movement of help. On the other side, you have the victims, those who lost their houses, those who lost everything. And on these victims, you see that those who are in a fragile position tend to become potential victims of rape or abuse. For example, I had the experience of visiting many, many refugee camps in areas like Iraq, and one of the biggest concerns for anyone administering a refugee camp is violence against women and against young female women, rape, sexual abuse, and this? And this is everywhere when you face a crisis because it looks like a lawless area. You know, because it's so chaotic, that people think that that I would say that social fabric that protects society is just damage. And then people think, OK, now I can do whatever I can use my my extreme animal instincts because nothing will happen. And this is my second piece of advice. You need to be extremely mindful of keeping security forces, police force volunteers, or whatever to make sure people feel safe under these conditions. For example, it's not a good practice to have female toilets close to male toilets. It's much better that you put male toilets far away from female toilets because one of the things that is very, very easy to happen is someone just going to the wrong toilet and just following and trying to attack a female victim.
As important as cooking and preparing meals is to have this safety. So it's very important to keep police forces and to keep security or volunteers or whatever extreme, strong lights to make sure that nothing happens because people are fragile and people tend to become victims much, much easier, and this is very much related to the first topic because you need to bring people to safety. On this second topic, also, if you are, for example, on the boat doing rescues and, understand that the natural police forces are most of the time out of reach most of the time, phones do not work, roads are blocked. So you become a victim, sometimes you are trying to rescue someone and you become a victim. Every time you were doing rescue, go in groups. Try to use the local police force with you, and then so instead of 1 going to each place, go with more people and try to go to one specific place because this will increase, I would say, the safety of people. And convince people that staying in their homes, trying to protect will not make them safer, it will make them much more fragile, because if they think that OK, I will stay here to protect my house. You will be alone, and it doesn't matter if you have anything to protect yourself. You will be alone competing with criminals and the so don't do that, it's not intelligent and this is very, very important because this happens and. If you see. What happened? And this is not only a problem in Brazil, if you see what happened with the Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, it is the same. It's the same pattern that we need. And my third advice, and this is the toughest 1. In a couple. Of weeks down the road, or maybe 45 days, 90 days, the water will be lower, and this is where there is a massive risk that another crisis somewhere will take all the news and all the headlines on all the news, for example, in Brazil. We're in the country and people just turned page people just turn the page. For example, today, nobody talks about what is going on in Maceió, with the challenges of the mining that is collapsing in Maceió because there is another crisis, so maybe two months down the road, there is not a crisis. For example, in some areas of Brazil. Or somewhere is off the world, and people just shift the focus because we tend to love headlines, and people forget that. And this is where the most critical things happen because this is the time for you to build back better. It's the time that you need to spend money that you need to decide who did it wrong and that you need to decide how we will avoid this, because what is the worst thing that can happen? It's something like this happening again next year or in two years. And you did not learn anything as a society to avoid that, and these may happen. And this has a very strong chance of happening, so it's very important that people keep this on the top of their mind to solve this problem, to identify ways the biggest challenge of this kind of natural disaster is that most of the time, the preventive actions that you can do to avoid them do not give too many votes because they are not very visible, so we need to understand how we can do that and make sure that the population gives the right vote and the right value to the right thing to avoid this, because probably some cities will need to be displaced, some cities will need to move, for example, because of the waters and the damage. And these cost a lot of money. It's not just for giving, for example, a debt that will solve these will require a massive reconstruction project that will undertake and that will take probably years to be done without the headlines we are seeing today. So, always think about these three steps. And it's pointless to think about the third one. If people are still dying today because they cannot be moved to a safe place. So just give the right priority to the right things at the right moment. I hope you enjoy this podcast and that this could be helpful. I wish you a great week, my prayer with the people in the Rio Grande do Sul, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
