International Medical Corps has been active in the United States and its territories since 2005, responding to emergencies including Hurricane Katrina and the COVID-19 pandemic. Below, Shira Goldstein, Deputy Director of Country Planning and Programs for the US, talks about how responses in our home country differ from those in other countries.
There are so many differences. In the US, we’re working in a very resource-rich environment. We have ambulances, we have functional roads for the most part and, once the immediacy of the crisis passes, we have electricity and running water. In a lot of other countries where we respond, the environment and the infrastructure can present their own barriers to responding to the emergency. That’s not really the case in the US.
Another difference is the openness to mental health in the United States, where people in many places are starting to lean into the need for mental health support in the aftermath of a crisis. During the LA fire response, we were going to distribution and community reentry points and talking to people who, in many cases, were waiting in their cars to get back into their neighborhoods to see their burned houses for the first time. They knew it was going to be tough mentally, were willing to talk to a stranger about their fears and were really happy to accept resources from us.
One thing that we’ve seen consistently in our US response, especially in shelters for people experiencing homelessness, is that there’s a unique opportunity to reach people on the margins of society with dignity and care that they might not receive otherwise. For example, during the fire response, we saw people in the shelters whose homes had just burned down, but we also saw people who had been unhoused for years and who had longstanding health issues they’d never been able to address—but now they were in an environment that was safe and hygienic, where they had access to doctors and nurses who could provide care and medications for them. In a way, it provides an opportunity for us to reach those for whom providing healthcare is probably one of the hardest things to do. Our hope is that this emergency response has opened the door for us to continue to reach that section of the population.