Container Headed to Haiti on Friday
After one year, Capital G and Style Bermuda will watch their container full of donated clothes ship to Haiti on Friday, February 25th, 2011, thanks to the Missions Board from First Church of God, North Shore, Pembroke. The clothes were collected from Capital G and Style Bermuda’s clothing drive, “Fashion Gives,” held back in February 2010, to support the thousands of Haitians left in the aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake.
Hundreds of Bermudians dropped off clothes to Capital G on February 6th, 2010 for the Fashion Gives Clothing Drive. During the day, a secondary storage was needed and Berkeley Institute stepped in allowing them to use their gym for storage. With enough clothes to fill two containers, Tommy Chiappa, owner of T.C. Associates, showed his support by donating storage and trucker, Jody Smith, owner of Smith Transport, hauled the containers whenever needed.
Pictured below left to right: Keisha Webb-Gibbs (Capital G), Antonia Mills (Style Bermuda), George Butterfield (Meyer Freight), Natalie Simmons – Secretary Missions Board FCOG, Elder Ruth Ann Lambe First Lady First Church of God (FCOG), Alfreda Thompson Member FCOG, Maxine Pearman Member FCOG, Stewart Minors Member FCOG, Cornell Fox Chairman Missions Board FCOG, Bishop Dr. Vernon G. Lambe Sr. Senior Pastor & General Overseer FCOG and Harry Andrews from HWP.
“Members of our community really stepped up to the plate and supported our clothing drive the best way they could, whether donating time for services or monetary contributions” said Shiona Turini, owner of Style Bermuda. “Capital G, Meyer Freight, Tommy Chiappa, Jody Smith, Bermuda Bread Company and others all played a major role in helping us to organize the container.”
Unfortunately, shipping to Haiti proved to be very challenging due to infrastructure damage at the ports and the over-whelming response of clothing donations from other world organizations, so the clothing drive shipment was delayed. Recently, the Missionary Board from the First Church of God learned of the struggle to send the container and offered to facilitate the shipment through a secondary port, St. Marc. The church organized its own campaign for donations and will be sending an additional container, which is also scheduled to leave on Friday.
“When I first heard about this other container that was completely loaded with almost 600 boxes of clothing and shoes that never made it to Haiti, but was all ready to ship, I contacted our Bishop Dr. Vernon Lambe Sr. and he agreed that we had to send it with our container,” said Cornell Fox of the First Church of God. “It’s one year later, but there are still so many Haitians who need our help and can definitely use those clothes. HWP Group was gracious enough to donate three electric bikes for the missionary work in Haiti and members of the church and other interested members of the community donated a further 483 boxes of items for our container including canned food, household items, mattresses, school supplies, clothing and shoes.”
Beautiful!!
While it is uncomfortable to acknowledge this, gift in kind (GIK) donations are often an ineffective way of helping poor people in other countries. In some cases, this is obvious; flying low value foodstuffs to Haiti in a private jet isn’t cost effective. In other cases, such as donating used clothes, the issues are more subtle.
The short explanation is that most of the items people donate (food and clothes) are already sold by locals. Donations simply flood the market and put those locals out of business.
Many aid practitioners tackled this topic last month after the NFL made a big show of donating 100k t-shirts to World Vision. That debate about gift in kind donations is summarized in the following few posts.
http://texasinafrica.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-world-vision.html
http://goodintents.org/aid-debates/world-vision-nfl-controversy
http://texasinafrica.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-t-shirts-are-bad-aid-research.html
Andrew
took the words right out of my mouth. thank you.
Andrew- while I can understand your poitn and the discussion that surrounds GIKs, my question to you is what then would be a better alternative? to assist the people of Haiti?