Haiti: Patience is the Key

Kim Bentrott writes tonight about their day: the trip to the embassy with all of the orphanage children turned out not to be necessary, after a different official got on the case. But the paper work is still in process. They still don't know when they will be evacuated, and they are still in Haiti tonight.

They turned the day to good use picking up some water that hadn't been claimed by any relief agency, registering CONASPEH with the UN so it could become a distributor of relief supplies, and beginning to look for a new permanent home for when they return to Haiti, as they plan to do. There is more here: http://kimandpatrick.blogspot.com/2010/01/patience.html

Over and over in the Bentrott's blogs as well as in others I'm reading by other religious folks working in Haiti, it is the smaller groups who are being the most effective at distributing aid, because they know where the people are and have a network for finding out what they need. Case in point: The Bentrotts put the donated water bottles in their truck, drove to a few locations where they knew CONASPEH pastors were camped out and had received nothing yet, and gave them the water to distribute to their people. No mobs, no drama. Unlike the melee that erupts every time a big truck lumbers out of the airport or a helicopter drops a pallet of food. Another case in point: Some folks who have a small clinic that has burgeoned into a hospital loaded their most critical patients into a vehicle and set out to find a way to get them to the hospital ship Comfort. By asking around, they found a camp that some soldiers were just setting up. The soldiers radioed for a helicopter, which landed and took the patients away to the ship. All in less than an hour. The enormity of the tragedy continues to confound the governments and huge aid organizations, while the smaller networked ones are managing to get through to help their people. This is not a criticism of the large charities or of the governments....it's just that they aren't equipped to deal with the Haitian culture like those who have been doing mission in the country for decades are able to do, by using the bonds of trust they have built up with the people.