Scott Lewis, the head of a U.S. disaster relief organization, undertook last week to deliver a convoy of rice and beans to hungry Haitians unable to find food in the environs of Port-au-Prince. Unfortunately, he ran smack up against the chaos, confusion, and calamity that is Haiti today. Here's the the Wall Street Journal's lede from the account of his odyssey through the streets of the Haitian capital:
Scott Lewis hoped to deliver more than one million meals to Haitians on Wednesday via a 15-truck convoy brimming with beans and rice.
Instead, "It was the convoy to nowhere," Mr. Lewis said. Well after dusk, the 52-year-old founder of a U.S. disaster-relief organization had barely delivered any food, other than some bags left at a missionary hospital, and a few more bags that got looted from the convoy as it crawled along crowded streets.
Trucks conked out. Communication with the U.S. military broke down. Traffic snarled the streets. Hungry crowds made handing out food unsafe.
It's not typical for so much to go wrong on a major operation like this-in fact, on Thursday, the Army successfully delivered the cargo, in the largest single-day food distribution here. But a diary of Wednesday's journey reads like an anthology of the obstacles stifling efforts to deliver aid since an earthquake turned the Haitian capital to rubble two weeks ago.
"The whole world wants to know why we can't get food to the Haitian people," said Ed Minyard, a 59-year-old former U.S. Army Ranger running the convoy, after Wednesday's debacle. "Well, you just saw why."
Read the whole story. To people involved with trying to bring relief to this the poorest country in the western hemisphere, the frustrations must be enormous.
RLC
