January 16, 2010
Dear Friends,
Every new report from Haiti is filled with even more sadness. Anderson Cooper reported yesterday on CNN that thousands of bodies are being carted in trucks to the countryside outside Port-au-Prince to be buried in mass graves. If this is not done quickly, deadly pathogens and disease will quickly spread throughout the area. To add to the depth of this horror, there is no one to take pictures of the faces of the dead. Children will never know what happened to their parents. For the remainder of their lives, parents will only assume that their children were buried in the rubble or carted to a faceless and nameless mass grave.
As I tried to convey in my post a couple of days ago, all of Haiti is affected by this earthquake that has devastated Port-au-Prince. As I knew would happen, the rest of Haiti is already feeling the “human” aftershocks. I spoke with a friend this morning who has ministered with Youth With A Mission in St. Marc, Haiti. The YWAM director there told her he purchased the last 15 bags of rice that he could find in the city this morning. St. Marc is 60 miles from Port-au-Prince! A few minutes ago, another friend informed me that the hospitals in Cap-Haitien are completely filled with wounded and dying people from Port-au-Prince who were brought there by friends and relatives. Evidently, the hospital in Dajabon, Dominican Republic ~ the sister city to Ouanaminthe where we have our mission ~ is also filled with wounded Haitians. I’ll be going to Haiti on Tuesday to assess the situation in Ouanaminthe and determine how we can insure that our families there are fed and cared for.
As you listen to the major news networks, they continue with their mantra to “think big.” In other words, do all your giving through the huge relief agencies. From my perspective, this is a very short-sighted way to approach this mountainous problem. I would encourage you to “think small,” and support the ministries and organizations who are enmeshed in Haiti for the long haul. You should, by all means, support whomever you choose to and whomever you have confidence in. Just remember that millions of dollars of aid given to some of the well-known large agencies after 9/11 were misspent on overhead or never fully accounted for. There will, unfortunately, be those who rush to Haiti for this current crisis. Once the rubble and dust begins to settle, however, and the immediacy is not longer ever-present, many of them will leave Haiti and probably never look back.
For those of you who choose to give to Aslan, you can be assured that 100 percent of your gift will be used as you intend it to be to help the people of Haiti. We have been ministering in Haiti since 1996. Aslan owns six acres of land there, and our commitment to Haiti is permanent and unwavering. Six years ago, the International Foundation gave Aslan a grant of $5,000.00 to drill clean water wells on our land. Because of the innumerable obstacles we face at every turn in Haiti, it took us six years to locate a reputable driller who brought his equipment to Ouamaminthe to drill our wells! Below left is a picture of the 90 foot deep well we finally drilled this past March. Had Aslan been 
forced to literally close our doors due to lack of funding, we would not have spent that $5,000.00 for anything other than drilling wells. On our home page, page, www.aslanyouth.org, there is a link to www.ecfa.org, an organization we have been a member of in good standing since 1991. The ECFA has the highest standards of any charity rating organization, Christian or secular, in the world. Type in Aslan, Inc., and you can check out Aslan and see a copy of our 2008 Federal Form 990 and our certified audited financial statements.
Please keep Aslan in your prayers, and please continue to pray fervently for the people of Haiti. If God moves you to give to our work in Haiti, you can do so directly on our website through PayPal or you can send a gift to our mailing address: Aslan, P.O. Box 270, Red Bank, NJ 07701-0270. Be sure to designate your gift for Haiti Emergency Fund or Haiti Relief Fund. Much love to you all!
Sincerely,
Craig
