Helpful Food Aid

Hi friends & family.  I’m back.  I was in the U.S. for a bit more than a week to do pre-marital counseling with Joyce.  We had a wonderful time with old friends, but most of all with 4 wise couples at different stages of life.  They were able give us a good look into married life, which helped us to look into our lives and help us to start asking some important questions for our future.  Joyce & I will be blogging about this soon in our joint blog.  You should take a look.  We have a pretty cool story .

So for now, I am back in town and back at it again.  I should be here up until the wedding in late July.  As I was catching up on email and surveying the work that had been done in my absence and seeing where I would jump in, I received an email that made me pretty happy.  About a month ago I made mention of my concerns of food aid potentially destroying Haitian agriculture, making Haiti even more dependent on the international community.  I suggested that aid-bringers buy out Haitian crops to give back to needy Haitian people, killing two birds with one stone, so-to-speak.  A man who has been following the development of food distribution policies with me sent me this email showing that some of the high ups have been discussing the same thing.

Click on this link to find a document that outlines this plan.  In it (and around the website containing the document) you will even see where former President Bill Clinton personally apologized in March for his role in the destruction of Haiti’s rice industry in the past.  President Rene Preval also had something to say about this issue as he sought an audience with President Barack Obama.

I’m not sure exactly where this will lead, but I am happy to see this progress.  I don’t think that we can stop by just buying rice, but at least we are headed in the right direction.  There is still hope and the Haitian People must be a part of this hope.  This is a great step forward.

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