How to Help Haiti: This is outrageous! Get the food off that tarmac!

A woman prepares mud cakes at the zone of Cite-Soleil in Port-au-Prince
Feb. 3, 2010. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

Made with a little salt, margarine and dried yellow mud from the country’s central plateau, then baked in the sun, these "mud cakes" - or "gato te" in Creole – are a major income earner in Cite Soleil. The neighbourhood is Haiti’s poorest slum, home to 300,000 people and notorious for gang violence, which the United Nations blames for delaying food distributions after the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated the capital.

You can read the entire article here.

Okay. So only the poorest of the poor eat this kind of thing in Haiti. But this is totally unacceptable at a time when pallets of food continue to be stacked up on the tarmac at the Port-au-Prince Airport. Everyone is asking why is this happening, but I hear no one answering, providing a solution for speedy distribution of food aid.

This is why I thank God for hundreds of on-the-ground missionaries and humanitarian workers who have been there all along before the earthquake, quietly working behind the scenes, and who are now - in many cases, in spite of their own losses due to the earthquake - taking food and other aid directly to many overlooked groups of people.

I believe it would do far more good for the press to focus their attention on missionaries - the ones who know Port-au-Prince and the communities scattered all over the outlying areas. These are the persons experienced in bringing aid to their people when hurricanes have hit time and again in the past.

They know how to reach local doctors and nurses. They know how to find security personnel when they need them. They are the ones who speak the local language and can quickly build relief teams. Ask any Haitian and they will tell you the missionaries are the ones they have come to respect and trust.

My solution is to put your financial support behind these people. Put missionaries in charge of the distribution of aid arriving at ports and airports. Give these missionaries full access to the pallets of aid sitting on the tarmac, and you will see needs being swiftly met.

You may ask, "But how do we find these missionaries?"

Agape Flights alone has 130 missionary families on the ground in Haiti, already working hard to meet the needs. They have their own field directors, who happen to be seasoned missionaries, working on the ground in Haiti, overseeing the distribution of aid to the missionary families who work with them. That's just one missions organization and there are scores of others with missionaries working inside Haiti.

Put an end to this corruption we are hearing about. These missionaries are the people of character, the ones you can trust. These people are there in Haiti, not for themselves but for the people. Channel your finances through these folks and you will see Haitians finding long-term help.

To help you understand the problem aid workers are having, trying to find those with the greatest need, I will let you read the words of a journalist from the United Kingdom.

Ascertaining who had received aid was tricky: people who had received a little help were naturally reluctant to say so. At a small isolated camp in the district of Canape Vert, beside a steep, rutted road, a man tried to answer the question, only to be shouted down by other members of the camp. Roughly translated, the shouters were saying: “Don't say that, for God sake, or we’ll never get anything.”

He raised his hands. He was a market trader. He had lost his home and everything in it, including three of his six children. “Some of us, but not all of us, were given food coupons,” he said. “I can only speak for myself. I don’t want to lie. I’m a Christian.”

You can read the entire article here.

I want to share this Disaster Relief Resource I just discovered. It's a map of Port-au-Prince shelter camps and the main food and water distribution sites. This map was created on February 13, 2010. Click on the map to zoom in for a closer look.