CBS News

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002075–503544.html

Demo­c­ra­tic Rep. Deb­bie Wasser­man Schultz of Florida (shown at left) trav­eled with a con­gres­sional del­e­ga­tion to Haiti ear­lier this week. She didn’t like what she saw — or rather, what she didn’t see.

“We were actu­ally pretty struck by the fact that we didn’t see the Red Cross any­where, at all,” Wasser­man Schultz told Florida radio sta­tion WTFL, the Hill reports.

The lack of a vis­i­ble pres­ence of the Red Cross even prompted the con­gress­woman to ques­tion whether she could rec­om­mend that cit­i­zens donate to the group. “I wouldn’t say that,” she said when asked if the Red Cross was the best place for lis­ten­ers to donate.

Wasser­man Schultz’s com­ments may come as a sur­prise to Amer­i­cans who have donated gen­er­ously to the Red Cross Haiti relief efforts after a mas­sive earth­quake hit the coun­try in Jan­u­ary. The orga­ni­za­tion has col­lected more than $409 mil­lion in dona­tions, includ­ing more than $32 mil­lion from a text mes­sage dona­tion cam­paign facil­i­tated by the State Depart­ment and pro­moted by the White House.

Not to worry, the Red Cross has responded.

“The Amer­i­can Red Cross has been on the ground respond­ing in Haiti since the moment the earth­quake struck and has spent a record $110 mil­lion so far for food, water, shel­ter, health and fam­ily ser­vices,” the Amer­i­can Red Cross said in a state­ment. “Our efforts have touched the lives of close to two mil­lion people.”

Those efforts just may not be so vis­i­ble on the ground, a Red Cross spokesper­son told Hot­sheet, because the Red Cross relies largely on local Red Cross work­ers and vol­un­teers. They may not be as con­spic­u­ous, but they know the peo­ple, the lan­guage and the geog­ra­phy, and they have estab­lished rela­tion­ships with other orga­ni­za­tions and the government.

The Amer­i­can Red Cross says it has sent more than 165 trained dis­as­ter spe­cial­ists and vol­un­teers to Haiti to help sup­port and train more than 10,000 Hait­ian Red Cross vol­un­teers. Fur­ther­more, it reports that the Red Cross net­work has pro­vided relief items to 400,000 peo­ple, sup­plied meals to more than one mil­lion peo­ple, dis­trib­uted 60 mil­lion liters of clean drink­ing water, built more than 1,300 latrines and helped vac­ci­nate more than 152,00 people.

The orga­ni­za­tion has a three-to-five year recov­ery plan for Haiti.