A few days ago, I submitted the story about the article criticizing the Red Cross' use of funds in Haiti. Purely by coincidence, I just tripped across an interview on Reddit: the two authors of the article answering questions from the public. To make things even more interesting, Jonathan Garro from the Red Cross also jumped in to provide a counterpoint.
I have no axe to grind here: I donate to the local Red Cross, and am therefore interested to know whether the organization makes effective use of the money it receives.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @01:23PM
Turns out you can't just roll up to an earthquake-smashed city in a notoriously corrupt third-world country and start building houses left and right.
This is very true. My church has been involved in that country for about 30 years now. In that time I think we managed to build 30 buildings (1-2 per year). The level of corruption is pretty intense. It got so bad we would just get a group of people together and go build them ourselves. If I remember correctly they stopped going because of the threats of violence if we didnt pay up. So they started building in local areas that needed it too.