How to Feed Haiti

Jan. 19, 2010— -- Today, thousands of Haitians may get their first real meal since last Tuesday's earthquake thanks to a small, American nonprofit group, the What If? Foundation.

This decade-old foundation was started by a Californian, Margaret Trost, to help ease the burden of malnutrition for the children of the impoverished Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince.

Thanks to an influx of nearly $50,000 in donations over the past week, however, the foundation hopes to extend their program beyond its usual services in Tiplas Kazo, providing hot meals to thousands of hungry, displaced citizens in the Port-au-Prince area.

"The community there had a vision to feed the hungry among them," Trost says, and the organization, founded in 2000, has helped bring that vision to life.

The center, run predominantly by Haitians with the help of local St. Claire's church, was offering free meals to children and some adults when Tuesday's earthquake ravaged the city, temporarily closing down their kitchen.

But after the building was approved as structurally safe Sunday night, Trost and local organizer Lavarice Gaudin set their sights on reopening. Gaudin was en route from the Dominican Republic with a truckload of food -- rice, cooking oil, beans -- as of Monday afternoon in hopes of serving their first post-earthquake meal Monday night.

"Instead of our regular 1,500 meals a day, we are going to try to serve as many as possible -- could be thousands," says Trost who has been organizing the reopening with Gaudin from the foundation's headquarters in Berkeley, Calif.

"No aid has gotten to this spot yet [so] thousands of people are coming out -- they haven't eaten since the earthquake," she adds.

The foundation plans to expand their meal program as far as the donated money will allow, hopefully setting up satellite food stations to serve the homeless who have begun to congregate in outdoor, ad hoc villages in and around Port-au-Prince.