Can We Do More to Help Haiti?

New reports are coming out of Haiti. Reports of hunger, hopelessness, violence against women…It is heartbreaking to think that Haitians are fighting over things like sanitary napkins and don’t have a place to sleep at night where they’ll be safe. I know that there are, as hard as it is to believe, people in our country that face the same issues. But this is on such a massive scale that it seems impossible that we can’t do something. It seems like we would have learned something from the U.S. Hurricane Katrina disaster and the Asian tsunami that caused similar destruction.

Part of the problem is that there aren’t enough people on the ground to distribute supplies and, while dropping them from the air sounds like a nice idea, there are going to be a few very fast, very desperate people who decide to hoard supplies while someone who is ill or elderly is too slow to get even one of the items dropped.

Another problem is that people left the city where aid organizations were set up to head out to the country. There aren’t any resources in an empty field.

To make the situation worse, many aid organizations are hesitant to take people in need of medical help to a place where they can receive it because of the disaster with the Americans who decided to skip red tape and take a busload of unauthorized children out of the country.

I wish I had a solution to even part of the puzzle. I don’t. But someone out there has to have one. Someone has to be able to figure out how to build simple one room homes that have a sturdy, locking door that can be folded flat, shipped over to Haiti and assembled in minutes. Someone has to have a warehouse filled with compost toilets. Someone has to have enough materials to make a thousand solar ovens. Someone has to have water purification systems.

Maybe what we need to do is to ask a bunch of survival experts and off grid living folks to head to Haiti with the supplies and show people how to use them.

In the meantime, there are aid organizations on the ground working to help these people around the clock. And they’re going through money like it is water as they pay for all the supplies they need. So, while I don’t have a solution, I’m doing what I can do. I’m continuing to donate what I can afford to give each month. The Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and a number of other organizations are all accepting donations for their Help for Haiti campaigns.