Each box contains emergency shelter provision and life saving supplies. In Haiti, ShelterBox has been working with the French Red Cross, the US 82nd Airborne Division, IOM, ACTED, the Dutch military, local Rotarians, Scouts, MSF and Handicap International.

Boxes have been distributed to the people in most need.

Please visit www.shelterbox.org to find out how you can help support ShelterBox’s work around the world.

Music: Alicia Keys – Send Me and Angel
Penrice Community College – Song for Haiti
All copyright belongs to the artist/record company.

The charity’s CEO is in Port au Prince where 10,000 ShelterBox tents have been distributed to those left homeless in the tragedy, with thousands more tents on the way.

Tom has been undertaking a field assessment of ShelterBox’s operations in Haiti and meeting partner agencies who have provided support during one of the largest deployments in the charity’s history.  He is joined by ShelterBox’s International Training Academy Manager Ben Spurway (UK) and ShelterBox Response Team member David Eby (US), one of the first aid workers to arrive in Port au Prince following the earthquake on January 12.

To see photo & read the rest of the article, click here.

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.

Feb 10, 2010 – By Mac Margolis and Lucy Conger | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Hollywood couldn’t have done it better. Late in the afternoon on Jan. 22, an armored car packed with $2 million in cash rolled out of J.P. Morgan Chase headquarters in downtown Miami, headed to the Homestead Air Force Base. Thirty-four bricks of bank notes packed into ordinary office supply boxes were loaded onto a C-17 transport plane redeployed from Langley, Va., and dispatched to Haiti, lighting up switchboards at the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, the Federal Reserve, and military rescue bases in Port-au-Prince.

Before dawn the next day, the stash was on a helicopter bound for 34 branches of microlender Fonkoze. While Port-au-Prince’s nine commercial banks were in a shambles and Western Union was paralyzed, half of Fonkoze’s 42 agencies were up and running in four days, and all but two of the rest within a week. The amounts were trifling: no more than a few dollars per client. But for tens of thousands of desperate Haitians, the nimble infusion of cash amid the chaos and ruin literally meant survival. For the legions of aid bureaucrats, charities, civic groups, and emergency organizations struggling to get a grip on the Western hemisphere’s worst natural disaster in memory, Fonkoze’s nationwide client base of 200,000 depositors (50,000 of whom are also borrowers) was a ready-made lifeline. Could microcredit be the new Red Cross?

This is not exactly what the loan angels had in mind. Since at least 2006, when Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in extending credit to the poor, microfinance has been in the spotlight. The founder of the Grameen Bank, a Bangladesh-based credit outfit, Yunus believed in the transformative power of advancing as little as $10, $20, $30 at a time to people that commercial banks wouldn’t allow through the door. Now, experts reckon there are 75 million microborrowers worldwide who hold $39 billion in loans, and enthusiasts speak of billions of the poor waiting to parlay pennies into enterprises and kickstart development in the most blighted countries.

Such ambitions have drawn flak: “I am unaware of any historical examples of nations that climbed out of poverty on the backs of small entrepreneurs financed by credit,” U.S. circuit court justice and economic historian Richard A. Posner once commented. But microcredit initiatives have since bloomed in a thousand boardrooms, winning converts in the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and even luring major commercial banks, many of which now see the future of their industry in courting the “unbanked” multitudes.

But the Haitian earthquake illustrates a more pressing role for microfinance institutions: helping societies respond to shattering tragedies. Ironically, not so long ago many development experts assumed it was the microfinance institutions (MFIs) that would need saving in times of crisis. National calamity, they noted, falls hardest on the weak, depriving the poor of jobs and capital and so, they reasoned, automatically driving them into massive default. “If people could get no money, they couldn’t repay. The whole sector was threatened,” says Don Terry, a former IDB microfinance and remittances specialist.

In fact, the opposite has been the case. “Devastation typically paralyzes the big banks,” says Terry. “Microfinance institutions are used to dealing at grassroots levels in a way that large commercial lenders cannot.” In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch ravaged Nicaragua and Honduras, shuttering banks and destroying roads and bridges, microlender Fundación León 2000 stepped into the breach, putting its experience and vast rural customer network at the service of relief agencies. “Microfinance institutions were the only ones able to communicate,” says Alberto Solano, the Grameen Foundation’s regional CEO for the Americas.

MFIs swung into action again after the Asian tsunami in late 2004. Even as they buried the 200,000 dead and cared for the injured, rescue crews were faced with tens of thousands left homeless and desolate across Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. For that, they needed not just cash but an organization structured to parse the needs at ground level and get money to scattered clients. Enter microcredit experts like Grameen, which helped raise disaster loans and channel the credit to stricken families through local microlenders.

Haiti has been the acid test. When serial hurricanes battered the country in 2008, drowning whole towns, killing nearly 800, and wiping out jobs and savings across the island, credit services were threatened with extinction. Instead of buckling, Fonkoze expanded. The bank managed cash-for-work payments during the clean-up, rescheduled outstanding loans, waived interest payments, and reached out to new clients. A year later, more than eight out of 10 of the bank’s clients had repaid their loans. This experience proved critical when the earthquake struck. With Port-au-Prince in ruins, Haiti’s banking sector went dark for nine days, choking off the vital flow of remittances ($1.87 billion a year) that Haitians receive from relatives abroad. Though badly shaken itself, Fonkoze, the island’s largest microfinancier, kept working (from a borrowed van, in one instance), giving families access to cash for immediate needs as they waited for emergency rations of food, water, clothes, and medicine.

Microfinance is not likely to replace emergency rescue efforts, where immediate humanitarian assistance is crucial. “Giving grants might send the wrong message about microfinance, encouraging people not to pay back their loans,” says Grameen’s Solano. Others argue that microfinance could play a much wider role in first response to disasters. Because they tend to the poor, microlenders move in and out of dangerous areas, such as crime-ridden slums, where button-down lenders do not or will not go. Their vast client base also “creates a network that can locate people as the population migrates out of the destroyed capital and help distribute food, water, and tents,” says Fonkoze’s director, Anne Hastings. “If the technology were in place, [we] could transmit SMS messages and locate displaced people or evacuees and reunite families.”

To the founders, microfinance means much more than donning rescue gear and mopping up after tragedies, manmade or not. But when calamity strikes, and the world’s poorest people are in the way, no mission would seem more appropriate.

© 2010   http://www.newsweek.com/id/233334

It’s midday in Port-au-Prince and the sun is beating down from a cloudless sky.

It’s good news, another day without clouds means another day without rain.  But it won’t last.  Everybody knows the rainy season is now only a few weeks away, and a million people have no proper shelter.

A park on the edge of Port-au-Prince is sprouting what look like giant white field mushrooms.   They are actually large white tents, hundreds of them.  It’s the first proper tent encampment to be built since the earthquake. Along a high concrete wall workers are digging latrines, and building shower blocks.

In a few days from now 3,000 refugees from the centre of Port-au-Prince will start moving in here. But they will be the lucky few. 

Watch the video in this link to see what ShelterBox is doing   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8488728.stm

‘Huge number’

Despite repeated calls from everyone – from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to Haitian President Rene Preval – only a few thousand tents have so far arrived in Haiti.

Mr Gascon says there are simply not enough tents

“The priority for flights has been given to bringing in food and medical supplies,” says Christopher Gascon from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

He is in charge of building the mushroom tent camp. He has 40,000 more tents on their way from Panama, but by ship, not by air. And even when those do arrive, they will not be nearly enough.

It seems extraordinary, but so vast are Haiti’s needs that there are simply not enough of the right sort of tents in the world right now to house all the refugees.

“We are talking about a huge number of tents,” says Mr Gascon.  “These sort of tents are not widely available. They will have to be made, ordered from China. If you want 200,000 tents now its not going to happen, they are not there.”

‘Ghost’ camp

There is also chaos and confusion. The aftermath of every natural disaster is chaotic. But Haiti is especially so.  Every aid agency and non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the world seems to have poured in to Port-au-Prince.

In the UN compound next to the airport clean-cut young men and women strut around in T-shirts proclaiming “Scientologist Volunteers”.

Reconstruction: Haitian style

In a bar across the street a group of Belgian men are drinking beer. Outside their large white lorry has a banner draped across it with the name of their own tiny environmental NGO.

“We want to help, but the World Food Programme says they already have enough water trucks,” they tell me. But if the UN base is chaotic, it’s nothing to the Haitian government compound.

It’s housed in an old concrete police station just down the road. The car park is crammed with large four-wheel drives jostling for position and hooting loudly.

We manage to track down Charles Clermont, the Haitian official charged with building the mass tent cities that will supposedly house the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Port-au-Prince.  “We started work the day after the earthquake,” he assures me, “the first camp will be up and running within the next few days.”  Surprised, I ask him where it is.  “It is on the outskirts of the city, there is running water and there will be electricity and spaces, it will be operational within a few days,” Mr Clermont says.

Intrigued, I take down the details of the location and head out of town. The place is an empty stretch of highway that runs out to the mountains north of Port-au-Prince.  One thing is immediately clear, there is no camp. Instead on a stony hillside we come across one of the most extraordinary sites I have ever seen.  Hundreds and hundreds of people, camping in the open.

‘No help’

As soon as I get out of the car a crowd surrounds me. One young man speaks English.  I ask him where he sleeps.  “On the ground,” he answers, pointing to a patch of dirt further up the hill.  I ask him if he has had any help, any food or water.  “No,” he says, “we have nothing.”

Further on I find a young mother and her seven children squatting in a tiny shack they have fashioned out of sticks and old blankets. One of her children has a huge bandage around his hand.  “He had two fingers amputated after the quake,” the mother says.

Nearby Salnar Devoisie is lying on a makeshift bed. Her daughter is platting her mass of grey hair. There is a white bandage around the stump of her left leg. “I was trapped in the rubble of my home for three days. When the Israeli doctors got me out they said we will have to chop it off or you will die,” she says.  As we talk she rubs her hand against her chest as if in pain.  “It is gas. I haven’t eaten for four days.”

Despite the massive response from the outside world these people are still waiting for help to arrive.  And for nearly a million Haitians the coming night will be another night spent in the open.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8488728.stm

I have traveled with Angel in Haiti on prior mission trips there.

Donate Here:  Food for the Poor

Response Team member Lasse Petersen said: ‘We agreed with the local community that the initial tent allocation would be for families with pregnant women and families with newborns.

‘Port au Prince is overflowing with encampments of people sleeping out without basic shelter. The demand remains enormous, but with the help of our donors, ShelterBox has flown 5 aircraft and over 3,000 ShelterBoxes to aid those left homeless by the quake.

‘In the hospitals, orphanages and local communities we are making a difference and thousands of more boxes are en route.’

For more information please visit http://www.shelterbox.org

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

Click link for an amazing Video about this water filtration straw from Water is Life.
http://www.news9.com/Global/category.asp?C=116601&clipId=4468721&autostart=true

More Water is Life Photos & Videos Here