Now that Haiti is completely wrecked, how does anyone fix it?

With tremors still shaking the island nation that has never recovered from its own birth pains, the world’s nations sends tons of food and barrels of water to Haiti, which has depended on tons of food and barrels of water from the world’s nations to feed its people for decades.

As many as 2,000 charitable organizations had a presence in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince before the earthquake Jan. 12. The Haitian government depended on these organizations to provide basic food and health services to the population that the government could not or would not provide.

Haiti is a small nation of about nine million people that shares an island with Dominican Republic. It’s one-fifth the size of North Carolina and just 710 miles from Miami, the same distance as Miami to Durham. It’s almost irresistibly close — irresistible because compassionate Americans of all stripes are poised to flood Haiti with help.

It is vitally important — even while people who survived the earthquake are dying from their injuries and we are anxious to rush in with a cup of cold water and a pair of shoes in Jesus’ name — to think carefully about the best way to help Haiti now.

North Carolina Baptists have internationally renowned experience in helping people claw their way out of a disaster. North Carolina Baptist churches have 266 fully stocked disaster relief trailers and teams anxious to go out with shovels and chain saws and pull trees off of houses, clean mud from basements and rebuild lives as we rebuild structures.

After Hurricane Katrina 20,000 volunteers from North Carolina rebuilt 715 houses in Gulfport, Miss. When the weather warns of hurricanes we practically drool. We just want to help.

Haiti may be different. Aid agencies of all kinds are asking that initial aid be limited to money. Cleaning out your closets and medicine cabinets is not appropriate or helpful right now.

An MSNBC story by JoNel Aleccia points out that cartons of household goods quickly gathered and shipped to a disaster site without a specific request often have little value and cost more to sort and haul away than they were worth.

It often costs more to ship the items than their value. People on site can multiply purchasing power, so the $100 of bottled water you bought to ship to a disaster area could have turned into $700 worth of water if you’d sent the money instead. In fact, Aleccia said, after the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, aid organizers in Sri Lanka were forced to deal with donations of stiletto shoes, expired cans of salmon and evening gowns, among other worthless donations.

Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of the trade association National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, strongly recommends that no donation drives be conducted unless an existing organization on site in Haiti has asked for specific help. Already volunteers have shown up in Haiti so ill prepared they had to seek their own food and shelter from other volunteer organizations operating to help earthquake victims.

“When teams arrive without specific skills and without their own supplies, they drain resources that could better be used for actual victims,” Kristi Koenig, a disaster response physician at the University of California, Irvine, told Aleccia.

The question for North Carolina Baptists in Haiti is, “What is the best way to help Haitians?” We can imagine they need their homes rebuilt first. They need to get out of the open air, or tarp cities, bubbling breeding grounds for cholera.

Katrina recovery worked because communications operated. People heard announcements on the radio and responded and could present their need in an orderly way. Victims could show deeds to land. Roads connected their neighborhoods to supply stores.

In Haiti, whose home do you rebuild? What do you build with? If you buy or are given a tract of land and put up 100 cement block houses, who wins the lottery to live there? How do they maintain the house, pay for electricity or get a road to the neighborhood?

A prime minister of Haiti told a friend of mine the country has supplies neither of lumber, nor of steel. He suggested donor nations could help best by building a series of concrete plants to utilize natural resources. Locals can produce their own building material to build their own houses.

Raleigh Haitian pastor Erilus St. Sauveur said there is little skilled labor in Haiti and suggested that North Carolina Baptists consider building a training school at which to teach Haitians building trades. Not only would such a school contribute mightily to rebuilding structures, it would help create a desperately needed self-sustaining economic engine.

Ultimately, if Haiti is ever going to be more than a Disneyland for donors — “I’m going to Haiti! — it must establish an economic system that employs more than the 20 percent of people who had a job before the earthquake.

Baptists can help there if we are willing to invest in a few infrastructure pieces that we can leave behind, in the hands of locals. Are we willing to be involved in micro business loans? Tony Campolo, who has been ministering in Haiti for many years, has helped locals establish many small businesses. St. Sauveur says Haitians are entrepreneurial and can work wonders if they just had $300 to $500 in seed money.

That’s less than the price of one airline ticket for a volunteer eager to serve, but who might be more help by staying behind and sending his/her money ahead to provide startup funds for a business.

Such involvement will require some people onsite. Assessment teams will go as soon as it is safe and they will not be in the way.

Will we be willing to do what Haiti most needs from us, even if it means staying home?

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