meetin' important folks

Went to a meeting yesterday with Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi. He had a forum on the Mississippi Reconstruction Fund, which is a private fund set up to supplement government aid to victims of the storms (Katrina and Rita). There was an auditorium full of aid workers, city reps, FEMA people, and others - you mention money and people show up! Everyone was complaining that there isn't any good coordination happening amongst all these various groups, and that there were too many different "task force" groups spread out over the Gulf Coast that weren't communicating with one another. They thought maybe they should create a central body that would help collect information about what groups were doing what kind of work in what cities, and everyone could go to that central location to find contact details, assessments, meeting times, etc.

I thought to myself, "The UN was doing that by Week Two after the tsunami, and no one is doing that here yet, six months after Katrina." Crazy.