ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the general question of project participants and looks at two important issues: incorporating gender considerations in programming and engaging refugees in their own development process. Language is powerful. The terms used to refer to people affected by a disaster reveal attitudes about them. People and societies develop themselves. External agencies can help, but the people who live in the situation must take ultimate responsibility, and they gain the advantages or suffer from the mistakes of their, and donor's, actions. Journalists focus attention on the most dramatic cases of need. Governments request assistance for people in specific geographic areas, ethnic groups, or classes/castes. Some agencies fed a natural concern for people with whom they have worked in the past or who are of the same religious affiliation. An agency established a project to assist victims of the Nevada del Ruiz volcano eruption and mudslide that killed thousands of people in the town of Armero in 1985.
