MOLI VIEW™

Some things are simple. Your friend gets caught in the rain, so you lend her dry clothes and a warm blanket. Multiply that situation by, say, 150,000, and the gesture becomes more complicated. Last Wednesday an earthquake in Peru killed more than 600 people and left roughly 150,000 homeless. Help is pouring in from United Nations agencies, global relief organizations, individual countries, and humanitarians the world over. The challenge: how to deliver all those blankets, shoes, medicine, tents, and food to the right place, fast.
According to MSNBC, the Peruvian government is trying to maintain strict control over more than $10 million in aid, including naval vessels full of drinking water, 600 tons of food, 90,000 chlorine tablets, and 25,000 energy bars from Ecuador. That move that has international agencies like Catholic Relief Services and Oxfam complaining to the Christian Science Monitor about "bottlenecks" in distribution. President Alan Garcia is receiving plenty of help with logistics, though, especially from the United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
For OCHA, disasters are everyday. The agency's wonkish website, ReliefWeb, presents a matter-of-fact view of a world in crisis. Against a dull gray background, there's a map of Hurricane Dean bearing down on Jamaica; a shortlist of emergencies from Afghanistan to Swaziland; headlines announcing breaking catastrophes like "Typhoons Chase Millions of Chinese from Their Homes"; and a list of the latest natural disasters, where in just five days, Peru's earthquake has dropped to number three (behind Typhoon Sepat and Dean).
For each disaster, OCHA collects information from all the governments, NGOs, and individuals working in the area and publishes regular "situation reports."

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