To Russia with love - medical supplies contributed by AmeriCares

National Review, Sept 20, 1993 by Mark Cunningham

Chris chiaia, a 25-year-old regular guy from the idyllic suburb of Darien, Connecticut, is in charge of about $2 million worth of medicines and medical supplies in the heart of a country which is notoriously descending into chaos. It's not unusual, in the world of international aid, for young men to be out on the sharp end of things; the unusual thing is that Chris is quite on top of the job-though it undoubtedly helps that our hosts have their act very much together. These facts are not a coincidence, but rather a consequence of the way AmeriCares, the charity that employs Chris, does business.

AmeriCares put together this humanitarian aid shipment as it has well over a hundred others, worth more than $100 million, to the former Soviet Union. In the decade since it was founded, in 1982, it has sent shipments worth some $600 million worldwide. I went along as a member of the delegation that rode behind (and on top of) the cargo as we flew from Windsor Locks, Connecticut, to Vancouver, British Columbia, to St. Petersburg. When we landed, the rest of the group went off to tour hospitals AmeriCares has aided in that city; Chris stayed to oversee the unloading and follow the bulk of the aid 170 miles southwest to Pskov, a small industrial city near the Estonian border and the center of the Pskov Oblast (administrative region). I volunteered to go along and see the dirty end of the process.

Our hosts are the Public Health Committee of the Pskov Oblast. Pskov, a Russia hand once explained to me, is to Russia as Peoria is to America. The rest of the oblast is quite rural - Melanie Barocas, a photographer who joined us later, compared it to rural Arkansas (though the buildings are much more substantial, since the climate is quite rough). The authorities and the people alike are trying to cope with the difficulties bred by seventy years' misrule, the alien challenges of freedom (a chance for the young, yet another task for the old), and the instability, sometimes verging on anarchy, caused by the lack of a fully established successor regime.

These are matters Russians must handle themselves; Americans can only provide advice (sometimes bad) and some stopgap help. The Public Health Committee's biggest problem is that supplies cannot be obtained locally: in the division of labor within the old Soviet Bloc, pharmaceutical production was the job of satellite nations; medicines from aspirin to antibiotics, not to mention surgical supplies, are now available only on the black market and priced out of reach. Pskov the city has had some help from the central Russian government and from sister cities like Roanoke, Virginia; the 600,000 people in Pskov Oblast have had nothing.

It is an awkward fact that much aid to the collapsing East has been wasted or stolen. The billions with which the West Germans bribed Mikhail Gorbachev to free their countrymen disappeared, and the same still happens with much government-to-government cash aid. Relief shipments are whittled away by a gauntlet of corruption: beyond the omnipresent and ruthless "mafias," even public employees who were honest under the old regime are resorting to theft and extortion as their salaries vanish in hyperinflation.

AmeriCares prides itself on making sure the product gets to the people it's meant for. Elisabeth Whitaker, AmeriCares' project director for the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a daughter of diplomats, has built a network of reliable contacts throughout the region and regularly scouts it in person. The Russian Federation's Committee for Humanitarian Aid pointed her to Pskov as a region needing help; informal contacts confirmed that the Pskov authorities are sincerely trying to discharge their responsibilities. She has arranged for Sergei Albert, the deputy director of the St. Petersburg branch of the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity, to accompany us as translator, guide, and fixer. Chris, a veteran of a dozen previous airlifts, is painfully aware of the things that can go wrong; as a bonus they have me, the sort of conservative who expects things to go wrong.

In the event, very little does go wrong. It takes the Russians an hour or so to find an unloader that can reach our plane's main cargo section - but the Canadians had the same problem when we loaded half our cargo in Vancouver. The drive to Pskov goes off with only the slightest hitch, a jackknifed truck on the narrow highway holding up our "convoy" for a half - hour or so. We end up not unloading the trucks on arrival in Pskov - it was after midnight, and the men had already worked more than a full daybut Vladimir Labusov and Envar Esametdinov, our main contacts with the Pskov Public Health Committee, not only arrange for secure locks on the trucks and an armed guard overnight, but also for men to work on Sunday, a near-impossibility.

In fact, while Lisa Whitaker has vetted our contacts for honesty, they prove themselves excellent administrators as well: the kind who find a way to make things happen rather than the kind who tell you why nothing can be done. A dozen times Chris politely but firmly says, "We have to do this" - work on Sunday, post the guard, do the inventory now - and Vladimir looks briefly blank, then smiles and says, in what seems to be the only English he needs, "No problem": trucks and workers appear, a forklift, a dozen pretty clerks borrowed from "city hall," and, when it turns out the standard U.S. cargo pallet won't fit through the door of the Russian warehouse, a squad of Rangers (paratroopers) to help with the heavy unloading. In each case, I suspect, it was in fact very much a problem, but it happens, if not as smoothly as it might in Peoria, then as well as it would in New York City.