Santa Barbara, California, July 13 -- When a magnitude 9.3 earthquake struck just off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004, triggering a tsunami and killing more than 200,000 people within 20 minutes, Craig Redmond quickly joined the response, helping community members rebuild their livelihoods amid the wreckage.

It was an early, formative moment in a career spent responding to dozens of cataclysmic disasters.

Redmond is Direct Relief's Chief Operations Officer and a humanitarian leader who's spent more than 30 years working in Central and Southeast Asia, in the Caucasus, in the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. He described earthquake survivors in Nepal staggering, grief-stricken, around a flattened village after the country's deadly 2...