ShelterBox Head of Operations, John Leach said: ‘We are continuing to spread our net beyond Port au Prince .  A newly arrived two man team comprising of Greg Rogers (UK) and Tom Newman (UK) headed south to Jacmel.  They’ve wasted no time in assessing needs and setting up the first camps. Tom, who is on his first deployment, has been doing a great job in running logistics from Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and now has his chance to get out in the field.’

Please visit www.shelterbox.org to find out ways you can support ShelterBox’s work around the globe.

We are currently in the midst of sending over 1/2 million meals (that’s right, 500,000!), along with temporary shelter for 4,000. Please don’t get donor fatigue on us! We need your help!

Please be sure to keep up with our latest Haiti relief efforts  by reading and sharing Frank’s firsthand account: http://www.frank-mckinney.com/blog.asp?article=168 .

To donate please visit:  http://www.frank-mckinney.com/donate.aspx .

Tuesday, February 16 (10:30 am EST)  
Frank McKinney on “Live This Morning with Dave Lucas”- News 8 discussing his latest best sellers and Caring House Project Foundation earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.  To watch:  www.news87.net  (Arlington, VA)

Monday, February 22, 2010 (10:00 am EST)
Frank McKinney LIVE on “Your Carolina” TV in Greenville, SC talking about his latest best seller real estate book, “Burst This!” To watch:   www.yourcarolina.tv

Thank you for your support of the Caring House Project Foundation.  Please be sure to visit our website at  www.frank-mckinney.com  for the latest, as events are posted daily.

The house — built to resist hurricane-force winds and earthquakes — is a prototype of the “Little Haiti House Project,” brainchild of Orlando hotelier Harris Rosen in what he says is the second and more sustained phase of his relief effort for survivors of last month’s earthquake.

Rosen’s project is one of several ideas from Americans trying to help Haiti figure out how to dig out of the rubble and move forward. Others include fiberglass domes, plastic water containers made into bricks and shipping containers turned into houses.

On Wednesday, Rosen gave an Orlando Sentinel reporter a tour of the prototype of one of his Little Haiti homes.

The homes, at $5,000 each, would be sold to Haitians at 1 percent interest with flexible financing options for mortgages to be paid over 25 to 75 or even 100 years. Interest proceeds would be for microloans to Haitian entrepreneurs. His team expects to build 25 homes to start and envisions villages of about 200 homes each.

“Wouldn’t it be so beautiful? Could you imagine the pride of saying ‘This is my little house,’” Rosen said. “I mean the pride that will come with this is just unbelievable, and we are hoping it affects generations of Haitians.”

According to the International Organization for Migration, the earthquake left about 1.1 million people homeless. Settlements filled with shelters made of tarps and blankets have appeared across Port-au-Prince. Aid groups are distributing tarps, sheeting and tools.

“With hurricane season around the corner, finding a safe place for these people is a huge concern,” said Laureen Martinez, spokeswoman for the Mid- Florida region of the American Red Cross. The American Red Cross will be sending recovery specialists to the country to start planning for transitional and more permanent housing.

Pedro de Alba, a civil-engineering professor who specializes in earthquake engineering, cautioned that builders should be careful about importing expensive materials that aren’t available locally and that involve construction methods beyond the population’s expertise.

“Some people have come up with these really elaborate [ideas],” the University of New Hampshire professor said, adding that efforts might be better spent teaching people how to rebuild.

Among those with proposals for efficient, sturdy housing is Don Kubley, President of InterShelter in Alaska.

He says the solution for Haiti, and for future disasters, can be found in his high-tech fiberglass domes. The domes come in pieces stacked liked Pringles and can be assembled in hours. They have built-in solar panels and can be arranged into rooms, including kitchens and bathrooms. He said 40 of his domes can be packed into a 40-foot trailer.

Kubley, who has been working with a Longwood charity to create housing for the homeless, has already donated eight domes to Haiti relief efforts. So far, his domes there are being used for military and medical needs, but Kubley has been talking with several agencies about sending thousands more down for housing at a cost of $5,000 to $7,500 each.

A team at Clemson University in South Carolina has presented another idea: repurposing shipping cargo containers into housing by cutting large openings into the sides and attaching canopies.

The strong material can stand up to both hurricanes and earthquakes, but Assistant Professor Martha Skinner said they’re also very liveable: “They can be quite beautiful and homey,” she said, noting that reusing the containers makes them ecologically friendly.

Skinner’s team is coordinating with government and nonprofit officials and hopes to help set up homes before hurricane season begins.

Rosen’s Orlando team is still working on their concept, weighing the cost and efficiency of wind turbines and solar panels to decide which to use to offer intermittent electricity to the houses. They are also talking to suppliers about discounts on parts and waiting on the Haiti government to offer a site near Port-au-Prince and maybe help with transportation costs.

Rosen’s houses would have steel framing, rubberized membranes for roofs, zinc sheets over porches and heavy-duty drywalls capable of withstanding 120 mph winds and enduring a 6.2- to 6.5-magnitude earthquake, said Daniel Gutierrez, vice president of engineering and facilities management for Rosen Hotels and Resorts.

The project impressed Jéan E. Wilson, an Orlando attorney from Haiti who has been raising funds for long-term relief projects.

“I like the idea that he is going to create a village so that people not only have houses, but also ways to sustain themselves as a community,” Wilson said. “If all we do is fix things that the earthquake destroyed, then we are leaving the people no better off than before this happened.”

Rosen wants to sell his dream to individuals and corporations willing to put their name, and money, behind a modular home or an entire village in Haiti.

“To me this is a beginning and an opportunity to change the template and create something new,” Rosen said, “and maybe out of this horrible, horrible disaster we can create something good.”

Víctor Manuel Ramos can be reached at vramos@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-6186. Rachael Jackson can be reached at rjackson@orlandosentinel.com or 407-540-4358

BY SCOTT HIAASEN
SHIAASEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

MONTREAL — The United States and other allies of Haiti agreed Monday to a 10-year effort to rebuild Port-au-Prince and foster the long-term development that has eluded the Caribbean country despite decades of foreign assistance.

The commitment grew from a conference of 19 foreign ministers and international organizations, known informally as the Group of Friends of Haiti, who gathered in Montreal to discuss how to manage what promises to be one of the most daunting reconstruction efforts in modern times.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that 10 years of hard work — at least — awaits the world in Haiti,” said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who hosted the meeting.  “We must hold ourselves and each other accountable for the commitments we make.”

The meeting produced few details about the scope of the damage from Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake, or the potential cost of the reconstruction. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced plans to host a more comprehensive conference of donor countries in March at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

By then, Clinton said, the U.N. should have completed a review of all the needs in Port-au-Prince and the rest of the Haitian provinces, and their estimated costs. With emergency relief and rubble rescues still ongoing in the Haitian capital, a larger picture of the devastation and its long-term effects has yet to emerge.

“The extent of the devastation is almost more than any of us can grasp,” Clinton said.

Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, was noticeably uncomfortable discussing long-term reconstruction plans while tens of thousands of people in his country went another day searching for food, water and shelter.

Amid discussions of donor countries’ deference to Haitian sovereignty, Bellerive made an urgent plea for 200,000 tents needed to shelter displaced victims, and prosthetics for those who lost limbs in the catastrophe.

“I could continue on all of these emergencies; there are many,” he said.  “It is very difficult for me to talk reconstruction when we do not take these matters into account.”

Bellerive said it would likely take four or five years just to restore Port-au-Prince to what it once was — a sprawling city with too many people and too few jobs, where much of the population lacked electricity or running water.

But the affects of the earthquake go far beyond the city. Bellerive said the entire country may have to be remade, as the displaced flee Port-au-Prince by the thousands for their home provinces — the very areas so many people left for lack of jobs or opportunities.

“The redistribution of people has changed the whole country,” Bellerive said.

The ministers all agreed that any future redevelopment plans must be led by the Haitian government, not the international community. How these parties will coordinate is far from clear, though Clinton offered the tsunami recovery as an example, in which Indonesia worked mainly with the U.N. and the World Bank with guidance from an executive committee of donor countries.

“It’s important that we see ourselves as partners with Haiti, not patrons,” Clinton said.

Still unclear is how much any reconstruction plan may cost.

Last weekend, The Miami Herald reported that Haitian officials had made a preliminary estimate of $3 billion needed just to restore the capital’s infrastructure, government offices, schools and hospitals.

But Bellerive did not broach the subject during the meeting, and in a press conference he told reporters that the government has not made any estimate or formulated an amount of money to request.

In addition to discussing coordination, the foreign ministers also heard reports from a handful of aid groups and nongovernmental organizations working in Haiti since the earthquake.

Some groups used the conference to push for debt relief. Haiti owes an estimated $1 billion to foreign lenders and international banks; the interest on the loans has long been a drag on Haiti’s feeble finances.

Critics have said such lending practices have stifled development in Haiti — one 2008 study found that the Haitian government devoted more of its budget to debt payments than to health, education and the environment combined. In the past, the U.S. aid package to Haiti has included money to help the government pay its debts.

“It would be obscene at this time to be spending money on paying off the debts of the past,” said Robert Fox, executive director of the NGO Oxfam Canada.

Before Monday’s conference, Clinton signaled her support for debt relief, telling reporters:  “I think that’s a very important piece of the puzzle.”

Last summer, the burden on Haiti eased after the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and other lenders agreed to forgive about $1.2 billion in loans, some dating back decades. Haiti has about $38 million in outstanding debt to the World Bank, and owes $441 million to the IDB. In a statement Monday, the IDB said it was considering relieving the rest of Haiti’s debt.

However, Bellerive did not emphasize debt relief as a need Monday during closed-door meetings with donor countries, said Lawrence Cannon, Canada’s foreign minister.

For the past four years, the World Bank and the IDB — along with the United States, Haiti’s largest benefactors — have given only grants — not loans — to Haiti. The IDB has given $222 million in grants, while the World Bank has committed to more than $300 million in grants for development projects.

Given how much foreign aid went to Haiti before the earthquake — the U.S. alone devotes more than $280 million a year to the country — the reconstruction effort will almost certainly cost several billion dollars.

In the days after the earthquake, the U.N. made an appeal for $575 million in emergency aid. As of Monday, the U.N. had reached 47 percent of that goal, with another $120 million in additional soft pledges, said John Holmes, the U.N.’s under-secretary for humanitarian affairs.

A revised appeal will be issued in 12 months.   “We need significantly more,” Holmes said.

Miami Herald staff writers Carol Rosenberg and Daniel Chang contributed to this report from Miami.

Inside each container, called a ShelterBox, is enough gear to shelter and hydrate 10 disaster victims for six months.

Dyer is a small-business consultant from the Chicago area.   His volunteer job is get 1,500 ShelterBox units from Miami to Haiti.

“We have to help,”he said.   “These people were living their lives, and something happened that they had no control over.”

ShelterBox, an international disaster relief charity, started in 2000 as a Rotary Club project in the United Kingdom.

The actual box is a green weatherproof tub about two feet tall, three feet across and weighs 110 pounds — about the size of a small trunk.

It generally takes about $1,000 to build a ShelterBox, fill it and ship it to a disaster zone.

The contents are customized for each disaster. For Haiti: A 10-person sleeping tent, water purification tablets; insulated sleeping bags, collapsible 2.1-gallon water carriers; collapsible trenching shovel, rope, hatchet, jack-knife, screwdriver, hammer, hoe-head; multi-fuel stove; ponchos, mosquito-resistant nets, eating utensils, cups, plates, even a children’s activity book.

Authorities give priority to the most immediate needs, Dyer said.

Water comes after rescue and medical supplies.

“And because we (have)water purification, that qualifies our boxes to get in.”

Visit info@shelterbox.org
- KENNY MALONE

ShelterBox USA