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Photo by Stephanie Anderson Relief workers unload supplies from an Agape Flight Twin Otter flown by Stephanie Anderson. Skydive Chicago donated the use of the plane.

"People are doing so much for people they don't know and may never meet," said Stephanie Anderson, a Smokey Bay Air pilot who with her boyfriend Wes Head has volunteered to fly relief flights from Venice, Fla., to Haiti.

This week, the Homer News caught up with some of the Homer residents helping Haiti. See some of their stories beginning on page 8.

Pilots help with relief flights

Back in the 1990s, Smokey Bay Air pilot Wes Head had flown relief flights for Agape Flights, a Christian organization in Florida that runs weekly trips to missionaries in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas. Head's uncle, also named Wes Head, was chief pilot for Agape for 15 years. Head, a volunteer emergency medical technician and firefighter with the Homer Volunteer Fire Department, had planned to volunteer again this spring.

"And then the earthquake happened," said Head's girlfriend, Stephanie Anderson, also a Smokey Bay pilot and an HVFD EMT.

Agape normally runs one or two flights a week to the Caribbean. Since the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti on Jan. 12, Agape has made more than 60 flights and delivered more than 130,000 pounds of donated medical gear. With its operations in crisis mode, Agape put out the word: Send pilots, planes and fuel.

"It was synchronicity, really," Head said. "I had planned to volunteer the first two weeks of March. Steph hopped on a plane and went on down."

Last week, Anderson arrived in Venice, Fla., Agape's base on the Gulf of Mexico coast. Head arrived in Florida on Tuesday.

"It's basically mass confusion," Anderson said in a telephone interview from the Agape office last week. "They were doing everything they could to get out as much as they could."

Through one of those only-in-Alaska connections, Anderson has been staying at the Sarasota, Fla., winter home of a Homer couple, Bruce and Alice Shaw.

"He (Bruce Shaw) said, 'Of course you can stay with us, and you can have our car,'" Anderson said. "They've been treating me like a princess."

Head is from western Colorado and Anderson is from Minnesota. They met in Mexico and have been in Homer for more than two years. Anderson said she wanted to be a bush pilot.

"'I'm up for adventure. Let's go,'" Head said she told him. "Eventually we ended up in Homer."

Photo by Michael Armstrong Jan Flora checks the Ushahidi Web site for new 4636 text messages at a Wifi hot spot at the Down East Saloon.

Anderson flew a trip on Monday to Haiti with her former boss, Rook Nelson, of Skydive Chicago. She hadn't seen Nelson in four years, but when Agape said it needed more planes, Anderson tracked Nelson down using Facebook and asked if he could loan Agape a plane.

"I heard back from him immediately," she said.

Not only did Nelson offer a plane, he was in Sebastian, Fla., on the East coast.

"By the grace of God things are falling in place," Anderson said.

Anderson and Rook flew a non-Agape flight for Son Light Missions on Monday with 4,000 pounds of tents and two passengers who would set them up. In an e-mail, Anderson described flying into Port-au-Prince like trying to squeeze all of LAX's traffic into Homer. Earthquake damage was hard to see from the air, she said.

"However, you can see that everyone is outside. The streets are teaming with people and tents and debris," Anderson wrote.

When she first arrived in Venice, Agape put Anderson to work sorting supplies. As an EMT, Anderson knew what medical supplies would be most needed — she sorted out the kind of supplies that would go on an ambulance. Agape turned over its hangar to a supply warehouse.

"It's chock full of food, water, medical supplies," Anderson said. "Every time they get through sorting, the pile regenerates."

Planes from all over the country have been delivering supplies. One plane from Chicago came full of medical gear.

"They came with a ton," she said. "People are sending so much. It's awesome."

A log on Agape's Web site shows the deliveries to Haiti: A DC-6 with 25,000 pounds, an Embraer Bandit with 3,500 pounds, a Twin Otter with 4,000 pounds.

"(Agape) moved more freight than they've moved all of last year," Anderson said. "It's a huge humanitarian effort. It's amazing to be part of."

With missions already set up in Haiti, Agape has the contacts to get supplies in.

"Their people know the roads. They know what's been destroyed. They know what's accessible," Anderson said.

People who want to help Agape can donate online through its Web site, www.agapeflights.com. A big need is money for fuel, Anderson said. Head said a need in Haiti is for shelter, especially tents as the rainy season approaches in March.

"The situation on the ground is starting to get pretty bad," Head said. "They're really worried about housing. It's turned from search-and-rescue to how do we handle all these people who are without houses and places to live."

Anderson and Head plan to stay two weeks.

"It's been this truly impressive experience where I can't fathom the generosity and goodness of people," Anderson said. "It's devastating that it sometimes takes a tragedy to bring that out."

Rancher helps through online translations, mapping

It's an hour drive to the end of East End Road and Jan Flora's home on the Rainwater Ranch, but through her laptop computer and the Web, Flora has been working long hours working to direct help to Haitians who need it the most. Through Ushahidi — Swahili for "testimony" — an online crisis mapping platform, Flora has been translating and mapping Haitian pleas for assistance.

Hours after the quake hit on Jan. 12, Flora began reading about the disaster.

"I was reading everything I could find immediately after the earthquake and what was going on down there," she said.

She came across www.ushahidi.com, a Web site set up in 2008 to map reports of violence after the Kenyan elections. Ushahidi allows people to gather crisis information through SMS, or short message service cell phone texting, e-mail and the Web, and then map that information. When the Haitian earthquake hit, Ushahidi offered a connection between victims and rescuers — if victims could make their pleas known.

After the quake, cell phone service survived but was shaky. Many Haitians have pay-as-you-go cell phones and text because it's cheaper. Digicel, the main provider in Haiti, worked to restore the network with U.S. help.

"A bunch of geeky Americans ran over there with steamer trunks full of gear and got the network back up," Flora said.

FrontlineSMS:Medic, a nonprofit organization founded by Josh Nesbit of Washington, D.C., worked with a Digicel engineer, Jean-Marc Castera, to set up an SMS network. Castera came up with the idea of using a short code, 4636 (info), Haitians could text to ask for help.

Short codes are numbers cell phone users enter to connect to others. For example, the American Red Cross set up the short code 90999 for people to donate $10 from cell phone accounts. Like a text 911, by typing 4636 and a message and address, Haitians could call for help. Radio stations in Haiti put out messages telling people to SMS 4636 if they needed assistance.

"I guess they have a hell of a grapevine in Haiti," Flora said. "The word got around the country pretty fast."

The messages began piling up, most of them in French or Kreyol, the two major Haitian languages. Ushahidi began posting the SMS feeds.

"I got digging around the Web site and found the raw text coming in," Flora said. "With my high school French I was able to read a lot of them. Most of them said, 'Send food and water' and an address. Well, I can read that."

In the first few days of the quake, Flora worked 48 hours straight translating messages.

"There were lots and lots of texts coming in," she said. "People were trying to work them up as fast as they could. A lot of them were people buried in rubble."

Besides translating into French, Flora also had to make sense of addresses. Haiti uses the French system, where the district is listed first and then the street address. "12ãme seksyon leyogan" would have to be translated as "Commune 12, Leyogan Section," for example.

"I had a pretty steep learning curve there figuring out the stuff and how to be useful," Flora said.

By figuring out locations, though, Flora and thousands of other worldwide volunteers could pinpoint where the need was the most, giving relief organizations a fast, geographic understanding of how to direct help. On its Web site, Ushahidi classifies the locations and kinds of help needed. Over the weeks, the pleas have gone from "trapped in rubble" to "send food and water" and "person missing."

4636 Ushahidi now has a Web site, www.4636.ushahidi.com, where people can go to sign up to translate. Volunteers get a user name and password and can go to a queue where messages are to be translated and sorted. There's also a Facebook page, 4636 Ushahidi.

"It's amazing," Flora said. "We think these are just gossipy tools, these social media where you just hang out with friends, and it turned into this huge lifesaving tool."

As of Tuesday, 4636 Ushahidi had processed more than 15,000 messages, with 10-50 in a queue at any time. A big need is for Kreyol translators.

"It's really fascinating to sit here and actually be able to help somebody," Flora said. "The social media in Haiti completely changed how they do on-the-ground emergency work in a humanitarian crisis. This completely changed the game."

Jones returns from Haiti

"Every little bit makes a difference and if you donate a little bit or donate your time if you save one life it's worth it," said Bill Jones, born and raised in Homer and now in California.

Jones left with a medical contingent of the Transformational Development Agency for Haiti on Jan. 24 and got back stateside on Jan. 31.

After his team set up a clinic in a 1-mile-square patch of the Port-au-Prince suburbs, Jones toured the area with a ministry team and prayed with people, particularly the ones who medicine could not help.

"We were trying to bring them some hope and good news in the chaos," said Jones.

Within 10 days of the earthquake's strike, Jones teamed up with 30 members of his local congregation and headed down to Haiti with medical supplies, determined to make a difference.

What he saw was in a sense what he had expected from the nightly news, scenes of destruction and horror, but Jones points out that the beginnings of the calamity are rooted in the Haiti's extraordinary poverty, and current food and clean water shortages were only exacerbated by the quake, not caused by it.

"What you see on the news is absolutely true, but it's not the whole truth. Most of what you see is always the bad news and there is a lot of bad news. It's already a third world country with an extreme poverty problem and there were already shortages of food and clean drinking water," Jones said.

The biggest task for the Haitian people lies ahead of them, and the tragedy of the quake is as strong as the aftershocks to the Haitian nation and personal economy.

"The Haitian people are not strangers to death. But to have that many people die all at once was a major tragedy. What is a huge concern for them now is that many of them have lost their jobs. Almost everyone has lost someone, but now they're concerned about their future because the places where they were working either collapsed in the earthquake or are no longer able to be worked in," said Jones.

But even in an event marked by tragedy, Jones was moved by stories of survival through determination, heroism and chance, and he was awed by the Haitian people's optimism, even in the face of horror.

"In the midst of the tragedy there is also this thanksgiving and joy by those that are alive, by different choices, coincidences or just the grace of God," said Jones.

Jones was told stories about schools that got out for the day just minutes before the quake collapsed the roof of the school building, or the teacher who, for no particular reason, asked students to eat lunch together in one corner of the cafeteria and, when the quake struck that one corner proved to be the only place in the entirety of the room in which they could have survived.

Out of the rubble Jones hopes that the spotlight the world has shone on Haiti over the last few weeks will make a long-term difference in the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere.

"It's going to take some years for them to recover in one sense, but the country was already in a mess, and one of the benefits that I think is going to come out of this is that the world now sees Haiti," said Jones.

Jones witnessed the downtown of Haiti, where government buildings seemed to have been hit the hardest, and tax documents and identity papers drifted about on the hot dry wind, or are tread on and matted to the streets.

With so much damage, Jones hopes that with the help of individuals, organizations and nations, that Haiti can begin to more than rebuild its structures, but its government, its economy and the quality of life for Haitians.

Raising money from selling pins to losing pounds

Students on the southern Kenai Peninsula have been moved to respond to Haiti's overwhelming needs. Homer High School's Natural Helpers immediately went into action, quickly taking up a collection and selling pins. Homer Flex School also is taking up a collection, said Laura Norton, school secretary.

Eager to join the worldwide response, sixth-graders at McNeil Canyon Elementary School led an effort to empty change drawers, piggy banks and any place families might collect coins in order to assist with relief efforts.

"Just like everybody, they saw those images and heard the news and it was just so horrific that you felt like you should do something to try to help," said sixth-grade teacher Sheryl Sotelo. "It seemed like money would be the easiest given the distance and then (Haiti) could do with it what they needed."

The sixth-graders went home, told their families what they were doing, and the collecting began.

"Then they went to other classrooms and those kids came in and did the same thing in all the grades," Sotelo said.

Ten days after the idea took shape, the students had e gathered more than $400, and are researching the best way to distribute the money. After hearing about and seeing inflatable hospitals Doctors Without Borders are setting up in Haiti, "the kids thought some of the money could go toward this effort," Sotelo said.

Two other agencies being considered are the International Rescue Committee and the American Red Cross.

"It's great to see young kids concerned and wanting to help," Sotelo said.

People in the community also are exploring the possibility of bringing Haitian teenagers for a temporary stay in Homer. Anyone interested in knowing more about this effort can e-mail Catherine Knott at sansanding@hotmail.com.

In addition to taking up a special offering Sunday, the Salvation Army is offering the community an opportunity to join their effort to assist Haiti through a 50-percent-off sale at the Salvation Army Thrift Store from 5:30-8 p.m. Feb. 12.

"All money raised will be sent to the Salvation Army's relief work in Haiti," said Capt. Mark Thielenhaus.

Donations already are being collected at the store. Anyone wanting to make a donation by check should note "Haiti" on the memo line, Thielenhaus said.

"It's mainly just financial assistance right now. We're not at the level of sending goods there yet," he said. "We appreciate those that have wanted to give physical goods, but at this point we're not ready for that yet at our end."

The Salvation Army currently has had a multi-year presence of an estimated 700 officers and employees in the area struck by the earthquake.

"They will be doing relief work there for a very long time to come because they live there," he said, adding that since the quake, additional personnel have been recruited, but only individuals with specialized training.

Photo provided Root Nelson, left, of Skydive Chicago, and Stephanie Anderson, right.

As a part of a companywide effort, Homer's Safeway has also pushed its chips forward and worked locally to help out the Haiti relief effort.

Safeway Inc., made an initial contribution of $200,000 to the American Red Cross and UNICEF, and all Safeway stores including Homer's branch have taken up where that donation has left off by raising money at the tills, through Feb. 1.

"As soon as that happened they sent an e-mail out and had us convert the check stands right away and we've really been after it since then," said Safeway Manager Bob Malone. "I've been really impressed not just with how well people around here have been helping out but also with how much our nation has been helping out down there."

At the Safeway in Homer, customers brought in $630 for Haiti. Companywide Safeway's program has raised $2,246,000.

Woman challenges others to lose pounds for pledges

After three kids, Lori Christensen admits she has put on some weight. So when she heard about the Haiti earthquake, Christensen thought "Why not help Haiti and help herself in the process?" Her idea: Get pledges for every pound she would lose in six months and donate the money to Compassion International for Haiti relief and recovery efforts.

"It's been bugging me that I can't get it off," Christensen of her extra weight. "When I thought of this, it rang a bell. This will work."

Christensen is in the process of putting together pledge sheets, and challenges others to join her weight-loss pledge drive, what she's calling "Heart for Haiti." Her goal is to lose 100 pounds in six months. A South Peninsula Hospital employee in the expediting department, Christensen will get weighed by a nurse or doctor at the end of February and then start working to lose weight. She challenged others to take pledges. Anyone who wants to join her can call her at 235-5915 to get pledge sheets.

For more information on some of the relief efforts:

n To know more about the inflatable hospitals used by Doctors Without Borders, see http://m.boingboing.net/2010/01/21/haiti-howto-set-up-a.html.

n To know more about the Salvation Army Haiti response, see www.salvationarmyhaiti.org.

Have a story of your own or know someone else who has been helping Haiti? Send them to news@homernews.com.

Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong.@homernews.com. McKibben Jackinsky can be reached at mckibben.jackinsky.@homernews.com. Ryan M. Long can be reached at ryan.long.@homernews.com.