55 Disaster Strikes Haiti AGAIN In 2010 Haiti was hit with a devastating earthquake. HOT was afraid that any supplies or money we could send to help would never get to those in need, so we came up with the idea of providing weekend food for poor children (all the children were participants in the U.S. government hot lunch program) in the Little Haiti section of Miami. HOT did this by buying 100 backpacks and having an organization we were already working with fill the backpacks with food for the weekend. Either the food provided nourishment for the child, or was split between the school child and his/her preschool sibling or it freed up money for the parents to send to their family in Haiti (something they could do with far more confidence then we could have). 6 years after being hit with the devastating earthquake, Hurricane Matthew turned away from what would have been a direct hit to southeast Florida, and for a few hours stalled over southern Haiti. The southern part of this country of 11,000,000 people was again crippled. Poorly constructed houses and huts that again replaced similar structures (if you want to call them that) destroyed by the earthquake were swept away. Cholera ran rampant and the same people who suffered 6 years earlier were desperate for help. While writing this vignette, I went to Google to check a fact I was going to write in the next sentence but I think copying the first Google listing says all that is needed to understand the magnitude of the storm: Hurricane Matthew: Haiti south '90% destroyed' 8 October 2016 – “Nearly 900 people are known to have been killed by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti, with aid officials saying up to 90% of some areas have been destroyed.” (BBC News) But how could HOT help the Haitian people? Again, HOT was concerned that any supplies we purchased or money we sent would end up with either “government officials,” or “middlemen” who control much of the commerce. This time we sought out the one partner who we could trust to make sure what we sent would ALL end up with those in need, the “Archdiocese of Miami”. Additionally, as HOT always tries to lever its grants, we also partnered with B’nai Torah Congregation in Boca Raton. On Kol Nidre eve, (the holiest night in the Jewish calendar), the Rabbi (David Steinhardt) announced that HOT (from undesignated funds), offered to match up to $25,000 (that we subsequently raised to $36,000) his congregants contributed to HOT. He repeated his plea the next day at Yom Kippur services, and both times read the list of supplies requested by the Archdiocese (a list they got from the “Archdiocese of Haiti”). HOT used the same “shopping list” and in the next 6 days bought $72,000 of supplies (see the facing page) which were then added to the approximately $200,000 of supplies brought that Sunday to the synagogue. $36,000 from HOT grew to over $250,000. More than 7-1 leverage.