So what do you do in a situation like that? It’s easy—give them all the same birthday and throw a big party to celebrate their lives!

And what better day is there for that than on Haiti’s National Children’s Day (June 13)?

The Zanmi Beni children and staff went to a park in Port-au-Prince and had a great day of fun and celebration. A group of clowns were on hand to make the day extra special and all of the children got to eat birthday cake.

For most of the kids it was the first time anyone had ever celebrated their birthday. I have been so impressed with the level of care that our partner, Zanmi Lasante, has been investing into the lives of the children. The loving environment and attention to detail from the Zanmi Lasante staff have already made a huge difference in the lives of these children.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – May 30 was Mother’s Day in Haiti, so we held a special party for our “moms” at Zanmi Beni, the orphanage we started in conjunction with Partners in Health.

Those children who were able were encouraged to hand out gift bags to each of the staff members. We had a big cake with ice cream and it was really fun. It was touching to see the orphans giving their “moms” gifts and hugging them and kissing them. It really is like one big family here. The staff work so hard and it was good to have an opportunity for us to say thank you to them.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – This morning I joined a Haitian Pastor, Pastor Volner, on a helicopter flight to a remote community that we have been serving with food supplies. On the way we landed in a village called Pouille, home to a rural community of 1,800 people.

The pastor took us on a tour of a school he founded. The children were dressed in their red-and-white checkered uniform and looked amazingly neat considering the sparse environment outside the school walls.

This village is completely cut off by a snaking river, and the only way in is by air or boat. It was nice being in a place with no cars after several weeks of traffic in Port-au-Prince.

The Pastor showed me their primitive water system powered by an aging and difficult-to-run diesel pump. He also showed me an area he was hoping to turn into a vegetable farm for the school, but needed irrigation.

Our Pilot told me of a helicopter he could access to help us sling load one of our water purification systems in to Pouille. The solar pump could provide clean drinking water for the school of 300 students and feed a drip irrigation system for the vegetable farm. We’re working to make that happen.

We took off and climbed over some high mountains. Martin, our pilot with Samaritan Air, used patches of exposed white rock to generate lift as the morning sun heated up the air. After a short flight, we landed in a field in the village of Savanette.

Pastor Volner told me that the 2,500 villagers live from day to day on the crops they can grow. If the crops fail, they sometimes eat sugar cane all day long as their only meal. Before the quake, they would try to supplement their diets with food bought from Port-au-Prince, but that supply chain had ceased since the quake.

The pastor had collected a large kit form the OB warehouse the day before and had trucked it for 5 hours overnight to reach the village. We walked to the center of the village where the distribution was taking place.

A huge crowd was bustling to get a place in the distribution line. Today we were distributing MRE’s, rice and baby food and the distributions went on longer than we could stay.

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It was great to see how far reaching our partner network is. From our warehouse in Port-au-Prince, food is getting out to places of need in many parts of the country. On the way back to the city, Martin flew us over Lake Azuei where I was able to get some aerial photographs of our fish cages and our adopted village, Medan Belize.

We then followed the road back into the city and hovered over the fish farm where OBI will be helping to produce millions of tilapia, creating thousands of jobs.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – My day started with a distribution in downtown Port-au-Prince with The Salvation Army. OBI teamed up with them to hand out our collapsable water kits to 2,000 families. The Salvation Army has been working with a specific camp and do distributions twice a week, usually handing out food.

At today’s distribution the recipients snaked in a long line next to a drainage canal and the UN provided crowd control. One by one they filed through and first collected the OB water kits, then a box of high nutrition food from The Salvation Army. The water kits will help them collect and store clean water.

The next stop was the General Hospital on an assessment to see if we could place the Proctor & Gamble “Tide Loads of Hope” mobile laundry trailer.

I had visited the laundry facility at the hospital a few months back and only 2 washing machines were working. Now none are working and all laundry for the 700-bed hospital has to be done by hand.

The offer of the laundry trailer was of course a big hit and we will hopefully be able to proceed with that program and make it happen. While at the hospital I had a chance to check out the latest water system that Eric installed yesterday, right outside the pediatrics center.

The system was running great and lots of patients, staff and family have already been able to benefit from it. On the way to warehouse 1 we stopped into Dadadou to check on the school and the water unit, both of which were running great. The kids have started decorating the big tent with colorings and paper decorations.

Around lunch time, the first 6 of our medical containers arrived into Port-au-Prince, so it was all systems go getting them unloaded into warehouse 2. At 3 p.m. I had a meeting with the World Food Program and outlined our distribution network. We have been earmarked 20 tons of MREs for our distributions and I’m hoping to finalize the deal tomorrow.

By around 4 p.m. Larry Foltz had managed to unload all 6 40-foot containers into the warehouse–quite a feat! We locked the metal doors and our armed security guard started his patrol.

We will have armed guards on the door 24/7. Tati and our local staff will be back at the Dominican Republic border tomorrow morning to escort the next 6 containers to Port-au-Prince, and we should have all 12 in the nest by tomorrow afternoon.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – On January 12, I was in Jerusalem getting ready to fly to London that night and then on to Niger, West Africa.

I was due to spend a week working with the Niger team on various projects including an exciting new project using micro projector technology. The plan is to begin using videos to train people in remote areas in proper health and hygiene methods. This new battery powered projector that hooks up to an iPod has just opened the door to make that possible.

I had my tiny projector, my iPod and the portable sound system all packed and ready to go and then I received the message—earthquake in Haiti! I flew to London as planned, but then to Miami, Atlanta, Santo Domingo and (48 hours later) Port-au-Prince. The next weeks were spent running flat out on emergency relief projects; I didn’t have time to even spare a thought to my cancelled Niger trip.

At the height of the relief efforts in Haiti we planned to do a distribution in a remote village. On the day of the distribution I just happened to notice the portable PA system in my bag and put it in the truck just in case. It turned out to be a huge winner.

The local pastor doing crowd control was able to make announcements to the 2,000 people scrambling for the distribution. He was able to call each family by name to step forward for their relief kit. The PA system has been very useful in that same scenario several times during the relief efforts here.

Fast forward a few more weeks and Operation Blessing erected a huge tent in a camp of 3,000 people in Port-au-Prince. The tent is now a school building for hundreds of children who are back in class thanks to teachers that OBI is helping to support. OBI also coordinated with the US Navy SeaBees to build desks and benches for the kids.

We are even serving peanut butter sandwiches to around 450 students each day. The woman coordinating the school is a Haitian-American named Jounie. She has become good friends with the OBI staff, and we are constantly offering additional ways to support the camp. I knew this was the perfect opportunity to test drive the micro projector system, so I offered to set up a movie night for the kids in the camp. Jounie loved the idea, so we set about coordinating the best day and time to do it.

The weather forecast for last night looked good—no rain—so Jounie and I decided that it was time for movie night. She started sending the message out around the camp, and I realized I had better find a movie to show the kids!

My options were limited. I sifted through Eric’s (our national director) DVD collection and found a classic animation that the kids would love, and it even had a French language track. A little while later I had the movie formatted to my iPod.

Once it grew dark, a few from the OBI team headed over to the camp. When we arrived, we were greeted by an almighty roar and ear piercing screams, the kids were super excited. I set up the projector, plugged in my iPod and hooked up the sound system. The children filed into the tent and sat cross legged on tarps, boys on the right and girls on the left.

There was so much atmosphere, the kids were buzzing with anticipation and there was me, nervous to see if my system would last throughout the whole movie. I hoped the batteries were fully charged. I pressed play and the movie started and lit up the end of the tent. Immediately, there was silence; the kids were transfixed. Then, all of a sudden, one of the characters did something amusing and the whole tent erupted in laughter. And that was how it went for the next 90 minutes—silence then laughter, side-splitting laughter.

I stood outside the tent looking in. There were around 200 children packed in like sardines. It was hot in there, but they didn’t care. The children forgot about their tough circumstances and were having a blast. It was incredible for me to stand back and watch this huge tent bellow with joy thanks to a tiny LED projector and my iPod.

Jounie took movie night to the next level and handed out cups of popcorn to the kids. When the movie ended, the children applauded and cheered. The batteries lasted and probably could have kept going for another film. My first trial of the projector kit was a success. Jounie got on the microphone and asked the children if they wanted to do movie night again next week, no prizes for guessing what they said…

I have requested some CBN animations in French and a technician is already in the process of uploading a few films already formatted for my iPod. The kids will love it.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Operation Blessing’s relief operations in Haiti have become so huge that we have needed to rent a second warehouse. Now our original warehouse (warehouse 1) will be exclusively for food, water and hygiene supplies. Warehouse 2 will become a distribution hub for medicine and medical supplies.

At any given time at warehouse 1, our team of Haitian workers are tirelessly unloading shipping containers, preparing relief kits or loading the variety of smaller trucks and pickups our partners bring to collect supplies.

We have 17 approved partners in our network consisting of churches, local non-governmental organizations, and orphanages. Each group makes a pick-up appointment with the warehouse manager and arrives to collect pre-assembled kits. Each large palletized kit contains a variety of food such as rice, beans, oil, oats, peanut butter, and meals-ready-to-eat and can feed 250 people for one week.

Our partners are responsible for distribution to the camps or communities they serve. OBI team members have vetted the partners to ensure that the food is getting into the hands of those with the greatest need. Each partner also has access to hygiene supplies as needed and bottled water too.

It has been almost two months since the quake and food supplies in Port-au-Prince are beginning to become available. Markets are open and food is available to purchase. The big problem now is that so many people are out of work and they cannot afford to feed their families. Our relief supplies are targeting those families who have lost everything or, as in the case of orphans, had little to start with.

For many already struggling orphanages the increased price of food has made survival even more difficult for the children. Through our distribution network Operation Blessing is providing food to around 4,500 people on a weekly basis.

As news spreads about the Operation Blessing network, we have been receiving more and more requests each day from all sorts of groups hoping to access our supplies. A steady stream of brown manilla envelopes arrives in my hands each day—each one containing a letter from a group claiming to be an orphanage or a ministry in need of help.

It’s hard to know how many requests are scams and how many really do need assistance; it’s common knowledge among the NGO community here that there are groups posing as churches or orphanages which are really nothing more than a scam to tap into free supplies. The truth is that OBI can hardly take on any more partners, we’re already working at full capacity. So vetting the new applicants is not actually a problem as there are simply no more slots for additional partners.

But no matter how over-stretched we are however, there are some exceptions. Today I happened to be at our warehouse when a Haitian man came to the gate asking to see me. He reminded me that this was the second time he had asked for help, so I sat down with him to hear him out.

He told me that he and his wife run an orphanage for 57 children and were in urgent need of food for the children. There was something about his expression and the urgency in his voice that made me realize he was the real deal. I asked him where the orphanage was and if he would be like me to visit. He smiled and said he would be very happy if I would. So I asked our warehouse manager, Larry, to load up his SUV with some food supplies. We crammed it to the brim with rice, boxes of high nutrition individual meals, and water and set off into the tedious Port-au-Prince traffic.

Ten miles and 45 minutes later we bounced down a pothole-filled back road and through the metal gates of the orphanage. As is usually the case at orphanages, the children were very excited to see a visitor and I was immediately serving up high fives and belly pokes to the amusement of the beautiful little kids surrounding me.

The building itself had not been destroyed in the quake, but the entire group have been living outside under a big blue tarp ever since, too afraid to sleep inside. In one corner, near the collapsed perimeter wall, there is a fenced in area that looked like a chicken coup. I asked the director what it was for. “We had chickens, but some were killed by the wall, the others were eaten by some dogs,” he said.

Some of the boys were rustled up to help unload the SUV and the director shouted out a few names to the group. Four little boys stepped forward; they looked concerned and confused. “These four are new to the orphanage since the earthquake,” the director said as he did his best to tidy them up. I did my best to make them smile, but the offer of a high five and a friendly belly poke was not enough to help them see past their pain. I can’t imagine what those 4 boys have gone through. None of them smiled the whole time I was there.

The director took me inside to show me the house. The unfinished building was very sparse, it had very little color and hardly any furniture or toys. He called me into a small room and said it was the pantry. He reached down to the bottom shelf of an empty cupboard and pulled out three almost empty sacks of grain. “You see why we needed help,” he said as he reached into one of the sacks and pinched out a few kernels of dry corn.

It really shocked me, not to see how little they had, but to think that I was so close to telling him we had no more slots available at our warehouse. And we really don’t have any more slots available, but I told him that from now on he must come and collect food from OBI—we will find a way to make up the difference.

One of the hardest parts of this job is having to say, “Sorry, but no.” The truth is that right now in Haiti there is more need than all the aid agencies combined can meet and if OBI distributed to every group that asked for help, we would dilute our impact and never really help anyone. It’s vital to maintain a focus, and right now our supply chain is capable of serving and really making a difference to the lives of the 4,500 we are reaching with food.

Gridlocked traffic, exhaust fumes, blaring horns: a typical morning in Port-au-Prince.

Our relief efforts were back in full swing today, and a constant stream of partnering groups arrived at the warehouse to pick up supplies to be distributed to displaced families. In the Cite Solei slum our water team identified several new sites for water purification units.

The slum has thousands of displaced families and many have received little or no assistance with clean water. In some of the spots there is no water source. So in one area our team installed a huge 1,000 gallon tank from which to draw water. We will have a water truck making daily rounds ensuring that the tanks are full.

Back at the warehouse, I trained the first group of mothers (and father) in how to use the Lifesaver bottle. Our partner, Lifesaver Relief, has donated hundreds of bottles to be distributed to displaced Haitians. OBI has chosen to distribute the bottles to parents with very young children, especially nursing mothers.

We are doing the training in small groups to make sure that each parent has the opportunity to interact with us and ask questions. The Lifesaver bottle uses air pressure to force water through the filter; it comes out very clean and very fast under pressure. There was a lot of laughter as we all got squirted by water—clean, safe drinking water.

The team is getting ready to install our huge tent in Camp Dadadou to serve as a school. Today we were busy preparing all the parts and making sure there was a big space cleared in the camp. In the afternoon, our good friend Val came over to discuss details for expanding our fish farming project in an effort to establish over 100 new jobs and provide protein-rich fish to thousands of Haitians.

Today was the last of three days of official mourning and the usually busy streets of Port-Au-Prince were quiet.  I took the rare opportunity to drive some new team members a different route to the OBI warehouse. As we navigated the narrow streets of the Petionville neighborhood, we came across a church service taking place in the open air. 

The churchgoers were mostly dressed in white. They sang hymns to music played on an old electric keyboard rigged to a crackling PA system, as the early morning sun shone though their raised hands.

We made our way past former landmarks like the Hotel Montana and into the city. For three of the team members in the car, it was the first time they had seen downtown Port-au-Prince and the horrific destruction left by the quake. For me, it was strange to think back to the chaos the city was in one month ago compared to the relative calm of this morning. In places where we saw bodies lying in the streets, looters robbing shops, and fires still burning—now there is quiet.

Before we arrived at the warehouse, we were stopped by a huge group of Haitians blocking the road. Ordinarily, road blocks in Port-au-Prince are a thing to be avoided, but this was no angry mob. The group was on a prayer march around the city—one of many such marches we saw throughout the day.

At our warehouse we met with a contractor we hired to make a quick modification to our delivery system. With so many containers arriving this week, we needed to convert our entrance ramp into a loading dock. We have a superb staff member, Lonnie, with us from one of our U.S. warehouses, and he needed to be able to drive our forklift out onto the dock to unload the containers. Even with the modifications, the space will be tight for maneuvering the forklift at right angles to unload heavy pallets.

Lonnie mapped out the dimensions of the new dock on the warehouse floor and spent over an hour rehearsing and fine-tuning his unloading technique with the forklift. In emergencies we cannot afford to waste any time; the supply chain must keep moving. I watched Lonnie visualize his technique much like a sportsman will visualize a circuit, and I’m confident that when those containers start arriving he will have the pallets flowing in perfect rhythm.

At Camp Casa we installed a water purification unit to help serve the 2,000 people living there.  Our administrative assistant, Keisha, joined the field team today and was taking pictures of us installing the water system when a woman holding a baby approached her. The woman spoke to Keisha in Creole and pointed to the baby. Our translator stepped in and told Keisha that the woman wanted her to take the baby to the USA! “She will have a better life there,” the mother said in Creole. Keisha of course declined in the nicest possible way. It was a poignant offer set against a backdrop of tattered plastic sheeting in a dusty field surrounded by houses in ruin.

In another part of the camp a group of children struggled to get a homemade kite into the air. It was nothing more than a plastic bag tied to twigs. A 10-second flight was considered a success and merited high-fives and big smiles.

From Camp Casa we headed to a camp in Cite Solei, the most notorious part of Port-au-Prince—known for its gang violence and extreme poverty. I had been told of the water needs in this camp by another NGO and spotted it yesterday when taking off from the airport on a food drop. In the camp, the team met with the Mayor of Cite Solei and he told us of some dire water needs in several locations in the neighborhood. Our water team manager, Nick Balcombe, is going on an assessment tour with the mayor in the morning, and we should be installing the next water purifier in the afternoon.

In our “adopted” camp, Dadadou, we met with the camp coordinator and checked on the water system (which was running great). We took a team of Israeli post-trauma experts with us from our partner IsraAid. The team of young Israelis interacted with the children and coordinated specific activities designed to help kids recover from the disaster. Operation Blessing is planning on erecting a large 40 x 60 foot tent in Camp Dadadou, which will be used as a school, activity center and social awareness training center. There are so many children in the camp and the school will serve them as well as kids from 3 other sites nearby.

The OBI team members working in Haiti want to extend Valentine’s wishes to our loved ones back home; it’s hard being apart, but our hearts are full here knowing that we are taking part in bringing much-needed relief to the people of Haiti.

With a whopping 29 shipping containers arriving at the Operation Blessing warehouse on Monday, we will be working flat out next week. Each container is packed with essential relief supplies to serve the network of camps, churches and orphanages OBI is supporting. 

The U.S. Navy is delivering the containers fast and our warehouse will be overflowing with aid, but not for long. As they have for the past few weeks, the supplies will get out to the people who need them fast, but with so much volume we need more room. So I toured Port-Au-Prince this morning looking for warehouse space with a Haitian friend, Ralph.

We met Ralph while looking for a forklift. His glass company was literally smashed into millions of pieces during the earthquake. Ralph had just left his office and was driving home when the quake hit. He said the car bounced in the air and that he thought he had driven over a big hole. As he looked in the mirror, he saw a building fall behind him. Ralph realized it was a quake, and by then buildings were falling all around him.

Ralph took me to see a warehouse nestled deep in the heart of a neighborhood called Cite Militaire. When we arrived at the compound where the warehouse stood, the whole place was a tent city. Over 2,000 people are living under temporary shelters in the camp, but none of them were there. They were all in one corner of the compound under an unfinished factory that had been turned into a church.

Today was the second of three official days of mourning. All over Port-au-Prince, people have been dressing in white and converging on churches and national monuments to pray and remember those killed in the quake. The impromptu church I visited in the camp was jammed full and the crowd was singing worship songs to a Caribbean tune. Between songs, most would go to their knees and pray. At one point, they were praying and chanting in unison and my colleague leaned over and said, “They are asking for God to bless Haiti.”

We left the service to survey the needs in the camp and found that water was needed urgently. Some of the camp’s elected leaders showed us an empty cistern on the compound. We immediately called for a water truck to make several deliveries to fill the cistern and promised the leaders that we would return in the morning to install a purification unit.

In the afternoon, I was invited to fly to a remote airstrip with our longtime aviation partner Mission Aviation Fellowship. Operation Blessing has been supporting MAF to make food drops all over Haiti in places where there are large, hungry groups of displaced families. On this particular route, we flew two Kodiak aircraft capable of short take-offs and landings on dirt or grass airstrips. The Kodiaks are new state-of-the-art planes and perfect tools for this type of work.

We took off from Port-au-Prince and climbed to where the tent cities looked like patchwork quilts below. Our cargo on this run was boxes of ready-to-eat meals, destined for a mission group supporting over 1,500 people. We landed on a grass strip and had only just stopped the engine when the plane was approached by a large group of men eager to see what our cargo was. A group of American missionaries met us and pulled their truck up to the plane.

We formed a tight human chain and began to unload the boxes of meals. Hardly any supplies had reached this area despite a huge displaced population. As we unloaded the second plane, the men in the crowd motioned to their mouths and bellies to say they were hungry, but these MREs were destined for families already identified as in urgent need. To get supplies to this place by road would take a long time and be dangerous; in times like these, the Kodiak is an amazing tool.

With a completely empty plane, the pilot wanted to demonstrate the short take-off capabilities of the Kodiak. We taxied down the bumpy grass strip, opened up the throttle, and were in the air in a time that seemed to truly defy gravity.

Descending back into Port-au-Prince, I saw a valley full of rubble where there were once homes. In the streets, streams of people dressed in white walked home from their all-day church services.

Today the entire Operation Blessing team and a team of Israeli doctors from our partner organization IsraAid went to the village of Balan for a multi-faceted relief mission.

Balan is about 45 minutes outside of downtown Port-Au-Prince and, until today, had received no aid since the earthquake. The rural villagers find life a struggle at the best of times; the salt-parched soil surrounding the village makes farming almost impossible and their limited water source is filthy.

Now, after the quake, the few villagers who had jobs in the city are out of work and inflated food prices have made it extremely difficult for the families to buy food. The media has focused on the destruction in Port-Au-Prince, which is indeed a wreck, but very little has been said about the fate of the outlying villages.

Most of the homes in Balan are simple wooden structures covered in mud. The quake flattened a few of the homes, and the rest were shaken so violently that the mud tore off in patches leaving dust on the ground. Broken homes, lack of income, sickness and hunger—it is suffering that no human should endure.

We prepared 400 relief kits in our warehouse; each one consisted of rice, pasta, canned goods, MREs, oatmeal and personal hygiene items. When we arrived in the village, there were several hundred people already assembled. They let out a cheer upon the sight of our big green truck.

The first order of the day was to get the kits distributed. After the local pastor said a prayer of thanks, a representative of each family was called to receive a food package and a case of water.

With 386 families (totaling over 2,500 people), it was a hot, noisy and dusty affair. But it was also very touching as the villagers thanked the team as they receive their supplies. Mothers with infants were also given extra supplies of baby food.

Meanwhile, the Israeli doctors set up a clinic in the (unfinished) church building and were soon flooded with patients desperate for the rare chance to see a doctor. There were many children with severe malnutrition and diarrhea and quite a few with serious infections.

One child came in with a broken wrist; it had been broken for three days and, had we not arrived, he wouldn’t have seen a doctor! (We later took the boy to the national hospital in PAP, where he is going to receive treatment). The villagers often cannot even afford the transportation to get to a doctor, let alone the treatment, so many chronic diseases and ailments go untreated.

The doctors found children crippled because simple procedures were not carried out when they were needed. One crippled boy had a break in his leg that had been left to fuse that way. We are planning to send him to PAP tomorrow where an orthopedic surgeon will operate to give him mobility again.

The doctors are returning again tomorrow because they weren’t able to treat all the children in need of attention, let alone the long line of adults.

In the midst of the food distribution and medical work, the team searched out a spot for a WMI unit and set about tackling Balan’s horrific water problem. We had two men dig out a section of the stream so that it would be deep enough for us to draw a steady supply of water and, to the delight of the onlookers, our cage stacking technique commenced.

Having pre-assembled most of the unit in our warehouse, we were able to have it up and running quickly. For the first time in a very long time, there was a constant supply of crystal clear drinking water in Balan.

As soon as the villagers caught a glimpse of the clean water, there were buckets and bottles flying into the area from all angles. I took a step back to watch the villagers hustling to get water; a few horses were drinking from the murky stream and a group of kids were bathing.

This was our 6th unit installed since the quake, so at full capacity OB is providing 60,000 gallons of water to quake survivors on a daily basis and we have more units to install in the coming days.

We left Balan at dusk, having met three essential needs in one day: food, medicine and water. We will return on Monday to distribute shelter kits provided by the UN; the plastic sheeting will help to seal up the cracks left by the quake with the rainy season impending.

This type of holistic intervention at a single location is where OB excels in ensuring impact during our relief efforts around the world.