Haiti Approaching A Famine. (More of what we don't hear in the news.)

I haven't been able to find any articles on it yet, but Haiti is about to hit a famine. I live at a house at a church and we support a church down in Haiti that also runs several clinics, and a school. The hurricanes have killed off much of the livestock and has washed out families small farming plots they use to sustain themselves. The town where our sister parish is located is halfway between Port Au Prince and Cap Hatien. The road has been washed out to Port au Prince where all the cheap UN funded food is. Instead they are having to go to Cap Hatien where the food is much MUCH more expensive and the money we are sending them is not going nearly as far. Things were tight with the rebellion last year but things are a lot worse this time. Why is the rest of the world not being told this? I mean the UN food program workers are down there and know what is going on, so the higher ups in the UN have to know this is happening too. Why are we not hearing about it? (The average yearly income for a family down there is $150 dollars a year and many of the people we help down there get their only decent meal from the church.)

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Updated On: 10/26/04 at 08:46 PM

I was talking to a friend who went with a group from Indianapolis last year. One of her friends went back down a few weeks ago and was telling her things are terrible down there now. They are having to just have mass graves and burn people because of all the deaths.

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The problem isn't so much that there isn't enough food. It's that the food is not getting to them which is the biggest problem with world hunger. Food just doesn't get where it needs to go. It is easy to blame the Catholic Church but no one else is doing anything about it either. The Catholic church does A LOT that goes unnoticed when working with the poor and needy. Catholics in general have huge sense of social justice. They really do a lot of good with their hospitals, their outreach to the poor, etc. There really isn't any hard data on how much total but our church alone sent $38,000 down there last year to help run the school, and the clinics, and to pay the full time nurses we have down there. (We have a small church.) It may not seem like much but money goes much much further down there.) I am not saying it doesn't need improvement because it does, a lot of that is due to our society though. I really don't want this to become a Catholic bashing thread, I want it to be helping people to see what the news doesn't tell us. To show people that a there is a need out there our media doesn't think is important. I don't believe people have any room to complain how another group handles a situation when they do nothing themselves. I hope evEryone does charity work and that is not just giving money. Not everyone has money (myself included) so what is just as good if not better is giving your time to a cause. This happens to be one of my causes. For many on this boards AIDS is their cause, or the urban poor in the US are their cause, or breast cancer is their cause. If we let this become an argument that is less time spent helping these people. I guess it's just easier to argue about who dropped the ball rather than everyone working together to do our best to help.

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Updated On: 10/26/04 at 02:36 PM