{"id":301572,"date":"2010-02-10T09:32:53","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T14:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com\/?p=10903"},"modified":"2010-02-10T09:32:53","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T14:32:53","slug":"small-charities-help-haiti%e2%80%99s-isolated-areas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/301572","title":{"rendered":"Small Charities Help Haiti\u2019s Isolated Areas"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Small<\/p>\n

Small planes bring relief to Haiti's isolated regions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A scrappy network of individuals, small charities and private pilots is getting humanitarian supplies into some of the most isolated parts of Haiti.<\/p>\n

“There is a community that is hungry and can not wait for red tape involved with making things happen,” said Rose Emily Bermudez, executive director of Childspring International<\/a>, a faith-based medical charity. “What we have is a big heart that is open for the people of Haiti and we’re ready for action.”<\/p>\n

Churches, pharmaceutical companies and individuals are donating medical supplies and other items to Childspring, which operates out of a small office in a Midtown Atlanta church. The organization hauls the items by truck to an airport in Daytona Beach, Florida.<\/p>\n

From there, private pilots load the goods into their small planes for delivery to the Haitian island of la Gonave (see my related blog<\/a> for more details). The trip often involves a stop in Jamaica for refueling and to purchase food for the relief effort.<\/p>\n

“Food is cheap in Jamaica,” said pilot Andri Wiese. “You can buy a bag of rice for $30, a bag of beans for $60. And those are 100 pound bags.”<\/p>\n

Wiese, who runs several skydiving businesses, says volunteering for humanitarian missions in Haiti was a no-brainer.<\/p>\n

“You can see these areas that haven’t gotten any help, and no one’s going to do it unless we help these other groups out,” he said. “We are there. We have the infrastructure there. So, it’ll be wrong not to try and help out.”<\/p>\n

The small planes land on dirt roads and open fields, bringing supplies to missionaries and relief workers in remote parts of the country.<\/p>\n

“They have been like angels in terms of the assistance to us,” said Pastor Jean Thomas of the Haiti Christian Development Fund<\/a>. Thomas’s organization serves the people of Fond-des-Blancs, a small rural town in Haiti’s southern peninsula.<\/p>\n

Because Port-au-Prince was Haiti’s primary hub for the distribution of goods, earthquake damage to the city’s already fragile infrastructure hindered the flow of supplies to outlying areas.<\/p>\n

Reaching those places during the initial days after the quake would require some out of the box thinking.<\/p>\n

“We knew from flying into Port-au-Prince that the harbor was a mess and the airport was a mess before the earthquake,” said pilot Tony Zarinnia. “So, when I heard that they were going to send all kinds of supplies down to Port-au-Prince, you knew kind of where that was headed.”<\/p>\n

From his Michigan home, Zarinnia started working the phone — calling relief agencies, missionaries and pilots to coordinate some of the first flights to these isolated areas.<\/p>\n

“Without these planes, I just don’t know what people would have done,” said Jan Nielson, co-founder of Missions International of America<\/a> — a small relief organization serving Les Cayes, also located on the southern peninsula.<\/p>\n

“The planes have been a lifeline for many people, and not just in the fact that they have food,” she said. “When the Haitians see a plane landing, they know they haven’t been forgotten. So, the plane itself shows them hope.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Small planes bring relief to Haiti's isolated regions. A scrappy network of individuals, small charities and private pilots is getting humanitarian supplies into some of the most isolated parts of Haiti. “There is a community that is hungry and can not wait for red tape involved with making things happen,” said Rose Emily Bermudez, executive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4504,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4504"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}