Hi Original!

Thanks for the information.

I see one of the locations is really near by me! I'm going to give them a call. I have several young nieces and nephews (and two daugthers) and we probably can also donate a ton of out grown clothes as well.

My girl's high school requires them to do so many hours of volunteering each year in order to graduate (which I think was a great idea). I may also see if they need any help as well.

Hearts with Haiti
27 Horne St.
Raleigh, NC 27607
919-758-8085

P.S. Awesome board and thanks for all you do here :)

Here is an article about another way that people can donate to help the orphans of Haiti...

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Haitian-Orphanages-Leveled-by-Quake-Seek-Donations-1104038.htm

This website also takes online donations for orphans and also allows people to join a waiting list to adopt Haitian children...

http://www.orphancareintl.org/

Yes, here is one organization dedicated to the orphans of Haiti....

You can donate to it via PAYPAL....

http://www.oasisforchildren.org/


I will look for others.

As the people of Haiti grow more desperate, it’s difficult to understand why the outpouring of aid — from individuals, relief agencies, corporations and governments around the world — is apparently working so slowly.

We seem to have supplies, food, water, personnel and such on the ground. So why it is that no one appears to be in charge?

- James H.

Where is the Red Cross? I have heard about all the money that has been contributed by Americans but I have yet to see any Red Cross help from news crews who haven't seemed to have any trouble getting in.

-
Mark R.

The chaos in Haiti has been described by those on the ground as “unimaginable.” But let’s try to imagine what the equivalent devastation might look like in the U.S.

Here’s (roughly) what our country might be dealing in the first week of an equivalent scale of destruction:

The White House and the Capitol have been destroyed. Congress and critical government agencies overseeing finance, health and other domestic services have been critically impaired. Many of the government employees who used to work in those offices are dead.

There is no Pentagon (because there is no Haitian military).

With the risk of aftershocks and doubts about the safety of government buildings still standing, President Barack Obama holds his cabinet meeting outside in a circle of white plastic chairs.


There is no “situation room” set up to coordinate the government’s response. There is no FEMA. The well-financed network of local “first responders” that Americans take for granted is gone. There is no well-supplied National Guard to call up. (Haiti’s limited first response infrastructure was heavily damaged by the quake; many of its trained professionals were killed.)

The U.S. Interstate highway system has been destroyed (there never was one in Haiti), and travel by road is arduous.

The entire air traffic control system has been destroyed. Days after the disaster, it has been replaced by a small makeshift system that includes handheld radios. There is one functioning runway in the entire country at a facility about the size of a small regional U.S. airport. (Before the quake, Haiti’s airport handled about three flights a day. Since the quake, that’s up to 90 flights a day. But cargo planes filled with relief supplies circle for hours waiting their turn.)


The infrastructure to handle marine cargo has been destroyed at the major seaports — New York, Los Angeles, Houston. The only port left operable to serve the entire country is in Charleston, S.C., and it’s not set up to handle large volumes of cargo.

Police and foreign troops are trying to maintain order on the streets, but looting and fires have broken out. The FBI building (in Haiti's case, the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping mission) has been destroyed, and hundreds of people, including the man in charge, have been killed.

As much as one third of the population (in the U.S., roughly 100 million people) are without food, water or shelter and limited means of acquiring it.

The death toll can only be guessed. In a country of 9 million, the loss of 100,000 souls in a single disaster is a little more than 1 percent of the Haitian population, or the equivalent of 3.3 million Americans.

Millions of survivors are in need of urgent medical attention; many simply won’t receive it — even if relief efforts proceed flawlessly. Most local hospitals have been destroyed. The ones that remain have no supplies. Doctors have resorted to using hacksaws and vodka in place of surgical instruments and alcohol.


You probably don't have a savings account or credit card to tap to go live in a hotel for awhile — even if there were enough hotels left standing to get a room. You might try to stay with friends or relatives in the countryside (where, in Haiti, most people live on less than $2 a day). Or you might decide to flee across the border to Canada or Mexico, but you’ll likely be turned back. If you do make it out, you’ll need to find a friend or relative to take you in. You’ll also have to figure out how to get there.

You are powerless to help your friends and family. Even though the world has responded to the horror by sending money, equipment, trained rescue and medical teams, there are massive logistical bottlenecks preventing people and cargo — food, water and medical supplies — from getting to those in need.

As a result, many relief workers and their supplies have to fly into Canada or Mexico, and then try to find a truck and drive across country — dodging impassable roads and bridges. They also need to bring their own fuel. Most gas stations across the country are out of gas; many of those with remaining supplies have no power to pump it out of the ground. (And they can’t go to Home Depot and buy a generator.)

Foreign troops have arrived to help, but they are coordinating their efforts with dozens of other governments. There is no global “command center” to help things run smoothly.


If you're lucky, your house wasn't destroyed — but it may be in danger of collapsing. So you're probably huddled with friends and relatives in a makeshift “tent” city with little more than a blanket to shield you from the sun and rain.

If you’re lucky enough to get food, water or medical attention, it will likely be from one of the rescue or relief workers who just arrived from dozens of countries from around the world. These workers are also trying to cope with the chaos. They probably haven’t slept for days. Like you, they have limited access to information about what’s going on.

You may or may not be able to use your cell phone — though that will probably be one of the first services restored. When it is, expect it to be overwhelmed again by millions of people from outside the country trying to find out if their loved ones are dead or alive. Because many of those lost have been buried in mass graves, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers may never know how their loved ones perished. (A few may learn the horrific details by seeing a photograph or video clip of an identifiable body on a foreign news report).


With all of the money, people and supplies flooding in, you might expect the chaos to subside in a matter of weeks or months as things begin getting “back to normal.” That’s not going to happen in Haiti. For one thing, “normal” before the quake was a country just beginning to try to emerge from decades of dysfunctional government and abject poverty.

The greatest risk to Haiti’s long-term survival (if not revival) is that the world’s 24-hour news cycle turns its attention to the next disaster, and the opportunity is lost to rebuild Haiti as a viable state. In a wealthy, industrialized nation like the U.S., it’s hard to imagine the world turning its back after a disaster of such epic proportions. (Though readers in New Orleans might take issue with that statement.)

The past week’s outpouring of money and aid is a good start. But rebuilding Haiti will take years. Once the dead are buried, the wounded attended to and food and water supplies restored, the real work will begin. That will be the truest test of the world’s response to this horrific disaster.


© 2010 msnbc.com Reprints

I was just watching the news

Really disturbing how many orphans have been left without parents.

Sadly, they're left in limbo not knowing if they have surviving parents/family so can't be adopted or taken in to sponsored homes.

It seems the children tend to suffer most when it comes to such tragedies. Hopefully, they'll get placed with families or caring homes once the mess is cleaned up.

It makes me ill hearing on the news how they're vulnerable to exploitation. Anyone that exploits a child that just lost their parents should be shot (or any child for that matter).

Are there any donation sources specifically for orphanages?

PORT-AU-PRINCE - She is amazing her doctors, the 16-year-old choir girl who came close to dying but wouldn't in the crumbled concrete graveyard of Port-au-Prince.

More than two weeks after the earthquake brought down her school — and a day after she was lifted from the ruins — Darlene Etienne was eating yogurt, talking and regaining her strength Thursday.

"We are very surprised at the fact that she is still alive," said Dr. Evelyne Lambert, who is caring for her on a French hospital ship offshore.

One who didn't seem surprised was the girl's mother, a poor rice-and-vegetable peddler.

"I never thought she was dead," Kerline Dorcant, 39, told The Associated Press. "I always thought she was alive."

Why?

"It's God" hearing a mother's nonstop prayers, she said.

Added Darlene's younger brother, Preslin: "I think she has a special God."

Joy amid grief

The astonishing rescue of the high school student, by a French search team that refused to go home when others did, offered a moment of joy in this grieving city, where uncounted thousands were entombed in a landscape of broken and heaped-up concrete, wood and metal.

They're among an estimated 200,000 quake dead in Haiti, including 150,000 who Haitian officials say have been buried anonymously in mass graves.

The U.S. Army's bulldozers were digging into that rubble Thursday, knocking down shaky walls and beginning to clear away ruins in Port-au-Prince, where perhaps 90 percent of the buildings were destroyed or damaged in the Jan. 12 quake.

Just a block away, looters armed with sledgehammers were smashing away at what was left of shops on Rue de Cesar, making off with everything from candy to perfume.

Among tens of thousands of survivors, desperation has grown daily as a huge global relief effort has run into bottlenecks in air, sea and road transport, with looting and other security problems disrupting mass food handouts. Coordination remained a problem, leaving big gaps in food distribution.

The U.N. World Food Program says it has delivered more than 4 million rations, equivalent to more than 13 million meals, to some 500,000 people. But it projects that 2 million Haitians need food aid — now and until December.

Some 1 million quake-displaced people, surviving now beneath plastic sheets, cardboard, blankets or other skimpy covering in city streets and plazas, also need 200,000 family-size tents as a short-term shelter solution, international experts say.

The International Organization for Migration, responsible for internally displaced people worldwide, had only 10,000 tents in Haiti before the quake and is urgently trying to bring in more.

"The needs continue to outweigh the response," the U.N. humanitarian office said.

'A very strong lady'

Darlene Etienne was pulled from the rubble of her cousin's off-campus house Wednesday near the ruins of the St. Gerard school. She was rushed to a French field hospital and then to the hospital ship Siroco.

"At the very beginning, she was in very poor condition, but now she has been stabilized," Lambert said, telling the AP that Darlene was drinking water and had eaten yogurt and mashed vegetables. She estimated her chance of survival at 90 percent.

"Darlene is a very strong lady," her older brother, Preslin, 18, told the AP. And, he added, "very smart at school."

Darlene, the middle child of three, had left her family for the first time just nine days before the magnitude-7.0 earthquake, traveling from Marchant Dessalines, their hometown north of the capital, to live with her cousin and his wife while attending high school.

The quake trapped unknown numbers of students and staff in collapsed school buildings, hostels and nearby homes. Among the victims was the wife of Darlene's cousin, crushed by a falling wall in the back of their house. Making his way home from his office, the cousin saw the destruction and believed both were lost.

But on Wednesday — 15 days later — neighbors heard a voice weakly calling from the rubble and alerted authorities, who brought in the French rescue squad.

"They should not have been working anymore," said French Ambassador Didier le Bret. The Haitian government had declared an end to the search phase, but the French team was stubborn. "They felt that some lives still are to be saved," he said.

The team's Dr. Claude Fuilla walked along the house's crumbled roof, heard a voice and, clearing away debris, spotted the buried girl's head. The team dug a hole to give her oxygen and water, and within 45 minutes they managed to remove her.

"She was in very bad shape," Fuilla said.


Rare case of survival

Lambert expressed amazement at her survival, saying it seemed to defy "biological facts." Neighbors said they believed she was trapped in a shower room and may have gotten to water. Rescuers said she mumbled something about having a little Coca-Cola with her in the rubble.

Such long-term survivals are extremely rare but not unheard of — even up to two weeks.

"There is no firm rule," said Dr. Andrew Pollak, en route to Haiti with his team of University of Maryland Medical Center trauma experts.

"Assuming you were very hydrated beforehand, people can probably go a couple of weeks," he said.

Randall Packer, a biology professor at George Washington University and an expert on salt and water balance, said Darlene's youth was "definitely on her side because we're all a lot tougher at that age."

In blue sandals, white skirt and a pink sweater, Darlene's mother waited patiently to be taken by helicopter Friday to the French ship to be reunited with her. Meanwhile, they spoke by satellite phone.

"I'm going to come, my dear. I'm going to come," Dorcant kept saying, apparently responding to Etienne's pleas. "How are you feeling? Does it hurt?"

She then passed the phone to others with visible relief. "At last I'll be able to sleep."

On the nightmarish streets of Port-au-Prince, the French rescuers were out again Thursday, in their continuing, improbable search for lives to save.



© 2010 msnbc.com

Lots of foreign guns, not much aid

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Maxi Extralien, a twig-thin 10-year-old in a SpongeBob pajama top, ate only a single bean from the heavy plate of food he received recently from a Haitian civic group. He had to make it last.

“My mother has 12 kids but a lot of them died,” he said, covering his meal so he could carry it to his family. “There are six of us now and my mom.”

For Maxi and countless others here in Haiti’s pulverized capital, new rules of hunger etiquette are emerging. Stealing food, it is widely known, might get you killed. Children are most likely to return with something to eat, but no matter what is found, or how hungry the forager, everything must be shared.

The communal rationing, along with signs all over the city that say “S O S” and “we need food,” suggests that the food crisis here is growing. In a country where malnutrition was common even before the earthquake , the United Nations now estimates that two million Haitians need immediate food assistance. And despite frantic efforts by aid groups, distribution has been limited. As of Saturday, the World Food Program had reached 207,392 people in Port-au-Prince and 113,313 in other areas.

Compounding the problem, Haiti’s commercial food supply has been strangled by the earthquake’s damage. Fruits and vegetables from the countryside are still available, but in smaller quantities, at inflated prices.

And food imports — typically 48 percent of the nation’s total food consumption, according to the United Nations — have slowed to a trickle.

“The whole food supply chain has been trashed by the earthquake,” said David Orr, a spokesman for the World Food Program. “The port, the roads, the trucks, the whole commercial life of the country has been disrupted.”

It is not, after all, just homes that fell when the earth shook on Jan. 12. Supermarkets have collapsed to rubble. Butchers and bakers are dead.

At the Dimino bakery in Bourdon, a middle class area in the foothills above downtown Port-au-Prince, five people died when the ceiling fell in. The ovens are now buried in dirt. On the floor, plastic foam cakes lie overturned, their cheerful messages made invisible.

A few doors down, Elsie Perdriel cooked up what little she could. Her one-story home with maroon trim survived the earthquake, making her one of the lucky ones. But now she has 20 mouths to feed instead of four: seven children, including her grandson, a few extended relatives, and neighbors who lost their own homes.

It is a miniature civilization focused on food. Every day, one or two people are given the task of buying a single meal for the lot, but the purchases are small because money is tight. Work, a paycheck and disposable income all look a long way off.


Ms. Perdriel, an administrator with the national electric utility, has not heard from her bosses since the earthquake. Her son, Jean Sebastian Perdriel, 30, said his office by the port, where he worked for an import-export company, no longer stood.

“Nobody knows when they’re going to get started again,” he said. “Food, oil, rice, beans, it’s all expensive.”


Video: Haiti quake seen on surveillance cameras


Ms. Perdriel, a no-nonsense cook with her hair pulled back, displayed a pot with half of a chicken cut into pieces. “This should be for two people,” she said. “Now it will have to do for 20.”

Many other Haitians, while shouting for help in ever louder voices, are finding ways to share. In several neighborhoods of Carrefour, a poor area closer to the epicenter, small soup kitchens have sprung up with discounted meals, subsidized by Haitians with a little extra money. At 59 Impasse Eddy on Monday, three women behind a blue house stirred a pot of beans and rice, flavored with coconut, spices and lime juice.

They started cooking for their neighbors the day after the earthquake. On many mornings, they serve 100 people before 10 a.m.

“Everyone pays a small amount, 15 gourd,” or a little less than 50 cents, said Guerline Dorleen, 30, sitting on a small chair near the bubbling pot. “Before, this kind of meal would cost 50.”


Smiling and proud, the women said they did not have the luxury of waiting for aid groups to reach them in their hilly neighborhood. The trouble was, they were running out of food. They used their last bit of rice and beans on Monday.

Organizers for the group that fed Maxi, part of a government program that previously fed children in schools, also said their supplies were dwindling.

The most wrenching battles against starvation, however, can be found in the camps, the metropolises with tents that would resemble forts for first-graders, if not for the smell of urine.

Maxi lives in the best known of these locations, under a few sheets downtown, near the presidential palace.

The United Nations, the Haitian government and others have delivered food several times there in the past week. Thousands have been served — and thousands more are still hungry.

But at least they get food regularly. A few miles away, at a former military airfield outside the neighborhood of Belair, people still fondly recall the time four days after the quake that a United Nations truck appeared with boxes of fortified biscuits. Barefoot children smiled and packed their “cookies,” as they called them, into dirty T-shirts. An older woman with braids was so thrilled that she sang loudly with her hands over her head, and tried to hug one of the workers.

But that was the last time anyone came with food. Now the planes swollen with aid simply crisscross the sky overhead. The children who used to chase the helicopters hoping they would drop something have given up, as empty biscuit packages now collect underfoot.

Some people, like René Odge, 29, said they stretched the ration for more than a week by breaking the biscuits into small pieces.

But it could only do so much. Mr. Odge held up a green soda bottle. “I put salt in the water and it keeps me alive,” he said. “It keeps my stomach calm until I can find something else.”


Many of the mothers in the airfield said they had eaten only a few meals since the earthquake. Oslaurd Lundi, 25, sitting on the ground near her son Benson, 3, and her 6-month-old daughter, Shaina, listed her recent meals as the sun began to set: “Today, nothing; yesterday, a little bread; and a little bread the day before.”

She could see what she wanted. Just a few feet away, Mary-Claudette Alexi, 35, displayed a few pieces of pork and small breaded pies. The prices were relatively low: less than 15 cents for a small pie. But for Ms. Lundi and thousands of others, the price was still too high.

“I don’t sell much of anything,” Ms. Alexi said. “No one can afford it.”

This story, "Fighting Starvation, Haitians Share Portions," originally appeared in The New York Times.


Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The dusty soccer field lined with spacious tents is an oasis for earthquake survivors among Haiti's homeless sheltering in acres of squalid camps.

Competition for the canvas homes has boiled into arguments and machete fights, a sign of the desperation felt by the hundreds of thousands of people without homes struggling for shelter in this wrecked city. Haiti's president has asked the world for 200,000 tents and says he will sleep in one himself.

Fenela Jacobs, 39, lives in a 13-by-13-foot abode provided by the Britain-based Islamic Relief Worldwide. She says the group offered her two tents for 21 survivors but she ended up putting everyone in one tent after people threatened to burn both down if she didn't give a tent up.

Still, she says living in the 6-foot-high khaki home with a paisley interior is better than the makeshift shelters crafted from bed sheets propped on wooden sticks where her family was living before.

"It's a lot more comfortable," Jacobs said, though she added it gets really hot inside the tent in Cazo, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood hidden in the hills behind the international airport.

Tents are in desperately short supply following the 7.0-magnitude quake on Jan. 12 that killed at least 150,000 people.

The number of confirmed U.S. deaths stands at 60, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Tuesday, and another 37 Americans were killed but their identities have not been officially established. The department is yet to account for about 4,000 U.S. citizens who have been the subject of inquiries by family members or others since the quake.

The global agency supplying tents said it already had 10,000 stored in Haiti and at least 30,000 more would be arriving. But that "is unlikely to address the extensive shelter needs," the International Organization for Migration stressed.

The organization had estimated 100,000 family-sized tents were needed. But the U.N. says up to 1 million people require shelter, and President Rene Preval issued an urgent appeal Monday calling for 200,000 tents and urging that the aircraft carrying them be given urgent landing priority at Port-au-Prince airport.

Shelters needed before rainy season

In solidarity with earthquake victims, Preval plans to move into a tent home on the manicured lawn of his collapsed National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince, Tourism Minister Patrick Delatour told The Associated Press.

"It is a decision that the president has made himself," Delatour said.

The secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, planned to visit Haiti on Tuesday to study relief efforts.

The Haitian government and international groups were preparing a more substantial tent city on Port-au-Prince's outskirts.


Brazilian army engineers with the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti have cleared and leveled 12 acres north of the city, planned as the first of more than a half-dozen sites that officials hope will shelter the displaced before the onset of spring rains and summer hurricanes.

Col. Delcio Monteiro Sapper said the Interamerican Development Bank wants to clear a total of 247 acres owned by Haiti's government that could house 100,000 quake refugees.

Helen Clark, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, said providing shelter is a pressing priority that requires innovative solutions.

"China, for example, set up 400,000 semi-permanent houses after the Sichuan earthquake," she said in a statement. "Similar initiatives will need to be considered and supported for Haiti."


On the soccer field in the Cazo neighborhood, the tents are marked "Qatar Aid," a gift from the Gulf state, but some Haitian quake survivors have personalized theirs — one flies a Haitian flag, another has a Jamaican flag with a picture of Bob Marley.

"This was miserable," said Islamic Relief Worldwide's Moustafa Osman, from Birmingham, England, pointing to the few remaining homemade shelters at the site. "People were living like this everywhere."

Osman's own supply of 1,000 tents has yet to make its way to Haiti, stuck somewhere en route or possibly even waiting in containers that have arrived at Port-au-Prince airport but have yet to be unpacked.

He persuaded a Qatari search and rescue team that was leaving Haiti to donate their 82 tents. He desperately needs at least 16 more for the soccer field settlement, which houses 500 people. Latrines and showers are also yet to arrive.

Osman doesn't speak the local Creole language, so he went to a mosque and hired two Haitians to translate for him. He said he made clear to them that "we are not here for the Muslims, we are here for all the people."

He then negotiated with the St. Claire Roman Catholic Church for permission to use the field on their land for his camp and cleared it with Haiti's government. Fights broke out Sunday when workers were distributing tents, with families trying to get the shelters and others competing for space.

Osman confiscated a machete and temporarily evacuated his staff from the camp.

He worries there will be violence if he doesn't get the tents needed to house the remaining families. He hired two men among the refugees, clad them in blue vests marked Islamic Relief Worldwide and put them to work as go-betweens linking the people in the camp and his staff.

Relief and recovery effort

In Montreal on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and officials of more than two dozen donor nations and international organizations met to assess the progress of the relief effort.

The Haitian government asked the international community to provide $3 billion for Haiti's reconstruction, the tourism minister said. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told the conference his impoverished nation lost 60 percent of its gross domestic product in the quake.

U.S. officials say the rescue phase of the operation is over and the focus has shifted to relief and recovery.


"Outside of the food area, the two prime worries are: one, medical services or medical equipment, and, two, shelter," said Lewis Lucke, U.S. special coordinator for relief and reconstruction.

He said officials are seeing so many people unable to return to their homes that they are scrambling to get them plastic sheeting and other shelter. "This is one of our main priorities."

The U.N. reported Tuesday that more police officers were reporting for duty and Port-au-Prince was generally secure but there had been isolated looting. It said commerce was increasing, with banks, supermarkets and gas stations returning to operation.

The U.S. government is donating its old and unused embassy building in downtown Port-au-Prince to Haiti's government, which will use it as a temporary legislature, according to Delatour, the tourism minister.

The building, next door to the partially collapsed Parliament building, will be rented at a nominal $1 a year, Delatour said. One senator was killed in the collapse and another was trapped for days, but rescued.

There are 54 Americans confirmed dead in Haiti, and U.S. officials were seeking to confirm 36 other possible deaths, State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said Monday.


Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

NBC News and news services
PORT-AU-PRINCE - U.S. troops pulled a man alive from the rubble of a building in Haiti's destroyed capital on Tuesday, two weeks after a massive earthquake rattled the country.

The 35-year-old man, Rico Dibrivell, covered in dust and dressed only in underpants, was carried out from the ruins of a building in downtown Port-au-Prince and was driven off for medical treatment, Reuters reported.

A U.S. military spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that the 82nd Airborne rescued a Haitian man. He had injuries to at least one leg — a broken bone, the spokesperson said.

The rescue, 14 days after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake killed as many as 200,000 people, came as the U.S.-led relief effort was focused on getting help to hundreds of thousands of survivors left homeless, hungry and injured.

Most authorities had given up hope this week finding any more survivors.

The last known rescue prior to Tuesday happened on Saturday, when a man was extricated after spending 11 days under the rubble in Port-au-Prince.

Wismond Exantus, 22, told The Associated Press from his cot in a French field hospital on Sunday that the first thing he wanted to do was find a church to give thanks.


He said he spent the 11 days buried in the ruins of a hotel grocery store praying, reciting psalms and sleeping. "I wasn't afraid because I knew they were searching and would come for me," he said.

Haiti's government has declared an end to basic search operations for the living, shifting the focus to caring for the thousands surviving in squalid, makeshift camps.


© 2010 msnbc.com

Helpful list of aid agencies.....


CHARITY NAVIGATOR....
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1004

Who's Helping in Haiti?

You can count on the US government and its captive news media for two things in an emergency:


1. To turn disasters into 24/7 horror entertainment
(with the occasional moral lesson thrown in)

2. To glorify the power and might of the US and its fabulous beneficence.

Then there are the countries that quietly get the job done

and this truth squeaked through the news filter one time.


Video:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/788.html

Powerful Aftershock hits Haiti...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34928950/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/

Normally Wary Haitians Welcome US...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34949077/

Sources: U.S. takes control of Haiti
'We are the only ones who can get things done'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: January 16, 2010
11:20 pm Eastern

Stewart Stogel
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

UNITED NATIONS – Informed U.S. State Department sources tell WND that Washington has taken de-facto control of earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

"USAID has now taken control [of Haiti]," said one source. "We [the U.S.] are the only ones who can get things done."

Vice President Joe Biden told reporters at Homestead Air Force Base, Fla., where relief efforts are underway, that Haiti is a nation "that has totally collapsed."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the first White House cabinet member to arrive on the scene. She made a brief tour of the Port au Prince region on Saturday.

U.N. relief efforts, however, have been criticized as "disorganized" and "haphazard" by U.S. sources.

The U.N.'s Haiti operations center was destroyed in last week's quake. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's special representative, Hedi Annabi, who remained "missing" more than four days later, was found dead Saturday. Annabi was believed to be in the complex at the time of the quake.

In a statement released Saturday evening, Ban called Annabi the "gold standard" of international civil servants.

UNICEF, which operated separately from the U.N. system, saw its headquarters survive, but was also severely impacted because many of its personnel were in the field at the time of the quake. A substantial number of those still remain unaccounted for.

The West is facing its own social and political earthquake. Learn from Haiti's tragedy - society can break down. "The Fall of America and the Western World" DVD set documents why the Western world is "in serious trouble" ... and what you can do.

U.S. sources confirm to WND that Haitian relief efforts could easily surpass $1 billion in the next few months, much of that aid being financed by Washington.

The U.N. has already announced a $550 million international emergency fundraising drive.

Not only could the rescue and rebuilding efforts reach billions of dollars, but they could also take years to accomplish.

U.S. sources point out that even today, more than four years later, New Orleans is still rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina.

Meanwhile, in a hasty publicity move, Ban Ki-moon will fly this weekend for a brief one-day "tour" of Haiti.

It is not clear what Ban can do. U.N. sources tell WND that Ban will not venture beyond a few miles from Port au Prince airport.

He has no intention of trying to reach the city of Jacmel, which sources say is in worse shape than Port au Prince.

Ban's special Haitian envoy, Bill Clinton, elected not to accompany the U.N. chief to Port au Prince. Speculation says that Hillary did not want to be "upstaged" by the former president.

Meanwhile, U.N. sources admit that part of the problem that now exists in Haiti squarely falls on the United Nations and the international community.

Virtually nothing of substance has been done to build a credible infrastructure in Haiti since the military government of Gen. Raul Cedras was overthrown by the Clinton administration military invasion in 1994.

More than 20,000 U.S. troops participated in the 1994 naval and air campaign.

The U.S. forced Cedras to flee the country, but since, Haiti has seen its "elected" governments vacillate between Jean Betrand Aristide and his political nemesis Rene Preval, resulting in a near political paralysis.

Preval saw his presidential palace collapse last week, fled to the Port au Prince airport (where he now resides) and has only made some carefully orchestrated "trips" into the city.

Preval, it was pointed out by U.S. officials, is president of a government that does not exist.

Coincidentally, CNN showed video on Friday of a collapsed and deserted Haitian parliament building.

Of more immediate concern is the expected influx of Haitian refugees into the U.S.

"Months and years" of continuous U.S. aid to Haiti was mentioned by President Barack Obama at the White House on Saturday. Obama announced that former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton will lead U.S. fundraising efforts to aid displaced Haitians. For President Bush, it was his first return to the White House since leaving office a year ago.

"They [Bush and Clinton] will send an unmistakable message to the Haitian people," Obama explained.

"We are in it for the long haul," Biden added. "It is going to take years."

Informed U.S. State Department sources tell WND that Washington has taken de-facto control of earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Read the latest now on WND.com.

Read the latest now on WND.com.


Plus! A Christian legal organization is reporting a skirmish victory in the latest war against Christians and their churches – the demand that they essentially be silent in their worship.

I just added you as assistant.

Thanks!

Help to sort good from bad.....

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1004

Gunfire rings out...

Gunfire rings out from Haitian apocalypse
Posted 1 hour 17 minutes ago
Updated 1 hour 4 minutes ago

Slideshow: Photo 1 of 4

Haitian officials have warned the overall death toll may top 100,000. (AFP: Thony Belizaire)

Video: Haitians struggle after quake (7pm TV News NSW) Video: Aussies fear for their Haitian relatives (7pm TV News NSW) Video: Aid floods into Haiti (7pm TV News NSW) Video: Aid operation unfolds in Haiti (7pm TV News NSW) Video: Haitians 'will band together' (ABC News) Video: Girl alive under rubble (ABC News) Video: Craig McMurtrie in Haiti (ABC News) Audio: Frustration grows over wait for aid in Haiti (PM) Audio: Three million Haitians affected by quake: Red Cross (PM) Audio: Survivors need urgent shelter, supplies: aid agency (PM) Audio: US criticised over slow military aid response (PM) Related Story: 'Resilient' Haitians will band together Related Story: Angry Haitians block roads with corpses: witness Related Story: Bottleneck paralyses Haiti relief efforts Related Story: White House condemns pastor's 'devil pact' comments Related Story: NZ girls confirmed dead in Haiti quake Related Story: Australians urged to dig deep for Haiti Related Story: Qld man awaits word from family in Haiti Related Link: International Red Cross appeal Related Link: Twitter list: accounts sharing news from Haiti Related Link: Haiti quake: Special coverage Sporadic gunfire is echoing across Haiti's capital, as survivors of Wednesday's massive earthquake endure a third night on the streets with little food, water or medical supplies.

Anger and despair is mounting in Port-au-Prince, with rotting bodies littering the streets and little sign of desperately needed international aid for the three million people affected by the disaster.

Much of the aid remains at the Haitian capital's airport and some relief workers and officials say they are too scared to leave the security of the airport until day breaks.

Many on the ground in the Haitian capital say security is desperately needed, as most of the most members of the city's police force are busy searching for their own relatives.

There are reports of looting and scuffles have broken out as helicopters drop food over parts of the city.

As part of its aid effort, the United States is sending in more than 5,000 troops.

North America correspondent Lisa Millar is embedded aboard the US aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which is ready to sail for Haiti from the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

One of the questions over the USS Carl Vinson's deployment is that what is probably more needed is the comfort hospital ship that still sits off the coast of Baltimore in the north east United States.

It will apparently not arrive off Haiti for another week.

There has been some suggestion the US been slow to act, but the military and logistical challenges are extraordinary.

Some of the injured are already being brought to Guantanamo Bay, with up to 24 people being airlifted there and treated in the past 24 hours.

US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley says eight search-and-rescue teams with a total of 260 people are on the ground in Port-au-Prince and 30 countries have pledged or already sent help.

China, France, Iceland, the US and Venezuela are among those with teams in situ.

"Not only is the United States's commitment to Haiti growing, but also the international commitment as well," Mr Crowley said.

The US had also taken over air traffic control at the swamped airport which was now operating around the clock, he said. However, flights were delayed as staff struggled to unload supplies.

Haitians were also angered they had had no word from their leaders.


'Nothing is coming'

One group trying to free a man trapped in the rubble of the tax office looked up wearily at the planes flying overhead.

"We hear on the radio that rescue teams are coming from the outside, but nothing is coming. We only have our fingers to look for survivors," said Jean-Baptiste Lafontin Wilfried.

Despite the launch of the massive aid operation, there is no sign of heavy-lifting equipment among the rubble even as tons of material and badly needed supplies flooded the airport.

The rapidly decomposing bodies are also posing a major problem.

Port-au-Prince resident Jacky Dodard says corpse disposal has been random and chaotic.

"What is happening is that there is no help in the streets. Personally, I haven't seen any help," she said.

"So everybody is trying to drop their dead bodies somewhere. They don't know what to do with the dead bodies."

Haitian officials have warned the overall death toll may top 100,000 as a result of the powerful quake that ripped across the poorest nation in the Americas.

The International Red Cross said the quake, the largest in the Caribbean island nation in more than 150 years, has killed between 40,000 and 50,000 people.

"If international aid doesn't come, the situation will deteriorate quickly. We need water and food urgently," said Haitian survivor Lucille, still dazed by the scenes of devastation and carnage.


'More doctors, fewer journalists'

Witnesses say there has already been some looting in the city.

"More doctors, fewer journalists," one man yelled angrily, shaking his fists at a foreign media crew.

Haitian native and hip hop star Wyclef Jean has described conditions as "the apocalypse" and said Haiti needed to raise $1 million a day to survive.

"We spent the day picking up dead bodies. All day that's what we did. There's so much bodies in the streets that the morgues are filled up, the cemeteries are filled up," he told Fox News.

Doctors were struggling to treat the vast numbers of sick and injured, with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontiers speaking of patients with "severe traumas, head wounds, crushed limbs" and burns.

The United Nations says 36 of its staffers had been killed in the worst disaster in the global body's history. Another 188 were still missing.

US President Barack Obama sought to lift up a despairing people, who face acute shortages of food, water and shelter, offering $US100 million in immediate assistance.

"To the people of Haiti, we say clearly and with conviction, you will not be forsaken. You will not be forgotten," he said.

Mr Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, along with Brazil and Canada and other concerned nations, are planning to hold an international conference on Haiti's reconstruction, the French president's office said.

"People throughout the world want to help," said UN chief Ban Ki-moon.

"One of our biggest challenges will be to help them to help Haiti to the utmost," he said.

Page 2 of Article...

Tensions Mount in Devastated Capital as Aid Starts Flooding Into Haiti

Published: January 15, 2010
(Page 2 of 2)

Ronald Jedna, covered in white dust atop a damaged building, had just been freed, after spending a day caught in a crevice of his apartment building with heavy beams pressing in tight against his chest.

He said he tried to cry out but his throat was too dry and he was too weak. Only a whisper would come out. Eventually, though, a neighbor peered through a tiny slit, discovered him and managed to pry him loose.

“A day felt like a year,” he said. “You’re buried alive. You can’t scream. You wonder if anyone will ever come.”

Mr. Jedna had a deep, untreated wound in his shin. He stood atop the rubble looking for others who might still be breathing.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, described another “small miracle during a night which brought few other miracles.” An Estonian bodyguard named Tarmo Joveer was recovered, virtually unscathed, from beneath 13 feet of debris at the United Nations offices at the Christopher Hotel on Thursday morning, where 100 more of the organization’s workers remained buried inside. Rescuers found him with the help of electronic sensors and dogs brought in by the American, Chinese and French teams, and had helped keep him alive by piping him water through a tube.

But hope was fading for perhaps tens of thousands of others.

Residents interviewed through the city said that the cries that they heard emanating from many collapsed buildings in the initial hours after the quake had begun to soften, if not quiet completely.

“There’s no more life here,” said a grandmother, who nonetheless rapped a broom against concrete in hopes that her four missing relatives believed to be buried inside might somehow respond.

Pascale Valérie Lisnay, whose brother was buried in the collapsed trade school, said she longed to hear anything from him, a moan, a cry, anything to give her hope that he was still alive. Standing outside one of countless similarly horrible sites across Port-au-Prince, she dialed her brother’s cellphone number again and again, tears filling her eyes each time it failed to connect.

“He’s gone,” she said.

The United Nations said it had confirmed that 36 of its workers had been killed in the earthquake, 73 had been injured, and an additional 160 were still missing. The United Nations began an effort to send teams around to the homes of its more than 1,200 local staff members to see if they were still alive and what help they needed, the two officials said.

At the ruins of the Montana Hotel, where many United Nations workers stayed, a French rescue team had extracted three people alive and one corpse, said Mr. Wimhurst, the United Nations spokesman. Once the machines come in to lift large blocks of concrete both there and around the city, the toll is expected to mount sharply.

Mr. Wimhurst himself was inside the Christopher Hotel at the time the earthquake struck.

“It accelerated with extreme violence,” he said. The room was shaking so violently that he held on to avoid being thrown to the floor, praying that the pillar in his office would not topple over on him. After the shaking stopped, he navigated down three stories on a rickety ladder.

Kim Bolduc, the chief humanitarian coordinator for the mission, said she was sitting in her second-floor office in another United Nations building when the room shook violently and a huge crack opened in the wall in front of her. “I was just hoping it would stop,” she said.

The difficulties medical workers and rescue teams faced drew anguish far beyond Haiti’s borders. Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor of pediatrics at Columbia University’s medical school who is also the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and the president of the Children’s Health Fund, said he feared for the children of Port-au-Prince.

“Something like 40 to 50 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is kids,” he said. “Kids are much more fragile — a 30-pound block of a wall that would only seriously injure an adult will kill a child. They die much more rapidly of dehydration, of loss of blood, of shock. An infection will cause explosive diarrhea, which can kill a trapped child. Everything about this is devastatingly worse for kids than for adults.”

Tensions Mount in Devastated Capital as Aid Starts Flooding In.....

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The distance between life and death was narrowing in this flattened city on Friday, with survival after the huge earthquake depending increasingly on the luck of being freed from under rubble, on treating the thousands of wounded, and on speeding the halting flow of emergency food and water.

“Get me out!” came the haunting voice of a teenager, Jhon Verpre Markenley, from a dark crevice of the trade school that collapsed around him and fellow students when the earthquake hit late Tuesday afternoon.

Mr. Verpre’s father risked his own life to save his son’s, going deep into the hole with a blowtorch to try to cut away the metal that was pinning his son’s leg. Hours later, the young man was free. His mother danced.

By Thursday evening, the Haitian president, René Préval, said that 7,000 people had already been buried in a mass grave. Hundreds of corpses piled up outside the city’s morgue, next to a hospital. On street corners, people pulled their shirts up over their faces to filter out the thickening smell of the dead.

Such was the extent of the chaos and destruction that reliable estimates of the numbers of dead and injured were still impossible to make on Friday morning.

With reports of looting and scuffles over water and food, President Obama promised at least $100 million in aid.

“You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten,” Mr. Obama told the Haitian people in an emotional address at the White House on Thursday. “In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you.”

The first wave of American troops arrived Thursday to begin handling security and cargo operations at Haiti’s main airport, whose principal runway was intact.

“The main thing is to try to establish some order at the airport so we can start getting planes in and out,” said Col. Patrick Hollrah of the U.S. Air Force whose disaster-response team arrived Thursday night from New Jersey aboard a C-17 cargo plane.

In the cockpit of the plane, air traffic chatter could be heard through headsets, giving some sense of the barely controlled confusion in the skies. Planes were being forced to circle for two to three hours before landing.

Also Thursday night, the United States reached an agreement with Cuba to allow American planes on medical-evacuation missions to pass through restricted Cuban airspace, an official said, reducing the flight time to Miami by 90 minutes.

Meanwhile, doctors and search-and-rescue teams worked mostly with the few materials on hand and waited, frustrated, for more supplies, especially much needed heavy equipment.

“Where’s the response?” asked Eduardo A. Fierro, a structural engineer from California who had arrived Thursday to inspect quake-damaged buildings. “You can’t do anything about the dead bodies, but inside many of these buildings people may still be alive. And their time is running out.”

A number of nations pledged financial aid, deployed rescue teams and loaded cargo planes with food and supplies; relief agencies broadcast appeals and assembled their own aid teams; and Web sites were set up to connect people overseas with friends and family in Haiti. But United Nations officials said that Haitians were growing hopeless — and beginning to run out of patience.

“They are slowly getting more angry,” said David Winhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Haiti, speaking by video link from the Port-au-Prince airport. “We are all aware of the fact that the situation is getting more tense.”

A photographer working for Time magazine, Shaul Schwarz, told Reuters he had come across two roadblocks made from rocks and corpses. Residents had apparently set up the roadblocks in central Port-au-Prince out of frustration over the trickle of assistance.

“They are starting to block the roads with bodies,” Mr. Schwarz said, quoted by Reuters. “It’s getting ugly out there. People are fed up with getting no help.”

The Haitian National Police had virtually disappeared, Mr. Winhurst and another senior United Nations official said, and no longer had a presence on the streets, though witnesses at the city’s already filled main morgue reported seeing police pickup trucks dropping off bodies collected from around the city.

The United Nations officials said that the 3,000 peacekeeping soldiers and police officers around the capital would probably be sufficient to handle any unrest, but that plans were being made to bring in reinforcements from the 6,000 others scattered around the country.

The struggle to survive intensified Thursday, in dramas that played out around this city that has already suffered more than most, from centuries of poverty, violence and natural disaster. Despite the strength of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake, the United Nations reported that the damage, in fact, appeared to be confined to the capital and a few outlying areas, with the rest of the country largely spared.

The capital, however, remained on edge.

“There have been a number of aftershocks and people remain anxious,” said Riccardo Conti, the Haiti director of the International Committee of the Red Cross. “All the houses around us have been vacated and people are literally living out in the open.”

1 2 Next Page »
Reporting was contributed by Damien Cave and Ray Rivera from Port-au-Prince, Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations, Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York, Ginger Thompson, Jeff Zeleny, Elisabeth Bumiller, Helene Cooper and Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/americas/16haiti.html

Special Thanks to brentjanice for this one...

Some people will use disasters to take advantage of others.

Try if possible to verify the agency your donating too gets the money into the hands of the people in need.

Although not a member of the Catholic Church I am hearing they are one of the few that are helping the most in this area and are not corrupt.

Whatever anyone gives donation wise says volumes about their heart.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45528246

Special Thanks to blasher for this one...

Also . . .

http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf

Keep the Haitian people in your prayers always ...
they'll need'em long after this is over as well.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45517111

Special Thanks to cantgetmyname for this one...

Organizations accepting SMS donations:

American Red Cross: text "HAITI" to 90999 to donate $10

International Rescue Committee: text "HAITI" to 25383 to donate $5

Give on The Go: text "YELE" to 501501 to donate $5
(This was set up by Wyclef Jean)

Salvation Army in Canada: text "HAITI" to 45678 to donate $5

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45513213

Special Thanks to investor911 for this one...

Great effort!!! So far I have mobilized over 1500 of my network to donate through https://re.clintonfoundation.org/SSLPage.aspx?pid=3869 in the past 24 hrs.

http://www.clintonfoundation.org/haitiearthquake/

Every dime counts, so donate what you can afford.

Give your hand and support!!!

-911

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45496824

Special Thanks to Biowatch for this one:

Re: Haiti disaster relief

Other organizations to consider:

http://doctorswithoutborders.org/
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières

http://www.americares.org/

http://www.unicefusa.org/
UNICEF (as mentioned in previous post.)

And to check how well your donations may be spent:
http://www.charitynavigator.org/
(Their site seems slow at the moment.)

P.S., I hate to sound very cynical, but expect scams and phishing to show up soon on the heels of so much good will.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45495306

Special Thanks to investor100 for this suggestion....

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45491854

The Haiti Earthquake of 2010....

Hello Everyone and Welcome to the board.

It is obvious that this board is needed due to the disastrous earthquake that Haiti has suffered.

Please use this board to post any links about how to best support the people of Haiti in their time of great need.

You may not know it but Haiti has long been a very close friend and ally to the United States of America.

Read this link to learn more about Haiti's past, present, and future....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti