I spent a little over a week in Haiti and my first trip to Africa will be in 2013, so I don’t quite qualify as an expert on either subject. However, I have been fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with people that have been deeply involved in both places. My observations and conclusions come as much from conversations with those people as it does from my time in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake. I understand that there are huge differences between an event such as an earthquake and the ongoing devastation that takes place in slums like Mathare. We all pray that Jesus becomes apparent to the victims in both places and they come to know him as their savior. However, the way we respond and the outcomes we hope are achieved are not the same. My goal in this post is not to draw a strict parallel between these two situations but to consider how we spend our earthly resources to give comfort, aid and opportunity to those in such great need and how effectively those resources are used.On January 12, 2010 a magnitude 7 earthquake hit the impoverished country of Haiti. The epicenter of the quake was a few miles outside of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. The initial quake lasted less than 2 minutes. In that short time, hundreds of thousands of people were killed or injured. Another million or so were left homeless. These numbers are only estimates. No one really knows the true toll. Shortly thereafter the money began to flow. Some say that over $12 billion was donated to organizations to aid the people of Haiti in the aftermath of the disaster. Adding insult to injury, in late October 2010 a cholera epidemic began spreading into the city. It eventually killed over 6,000 people and sickened 300,000 more. The source of the epidemic is believed to have been a Nepali peacekeeping force that brought the disease with them.I arrived in Port-au-Prince in late October of 2010 just as rumors of a cholera outbreak were beginning to circulate. Driving around the city it was hard to imagine that the earthquake hadn’t happened only days earlier instead of 9 months before. The bodies of the dead were still entombed in collapsed buildings that were everywhere you looked. A very small portion of the debris had been moved and hundreds of thousands of people were living in the lawless tent cities scattered throughout the capital city. The traffic was chaotic, the streets were ruined and getting anywhere seemed to take forever. The daily 12 mile drive to our worksite took from 1 to 2 hours each way. I was part of a work crew that was rebuilding a security wall around a school that had collapsed during the quake. We worked alongside a Haitian construction company. In our group was an engineer who worked with the Haitian company’s supervisor to teach him how to build a wall that might be able to withstand the next quake.As I traveled through the city I saw the 4x4 vehicles of many of the major aid organizations in the world. Compassion International, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, World Vision, you name it and they were there. And they were everywhere! It seemed as though you couldn’t turn around without seeing a convoy of vehicles from one of these groups going by. Fast forward to today over 2 years later. The statistics that I found say that less than 50% of the debris has been removed and 400,000 people still live in tents. I found myself wondering how this could be. With all the money and people that have been poured into Haiti in the last 2 years, why is it still so far away from getting back to how it was before the earthquake? I realized that the earthquake revealed problems that cannot be solved with a quick influx of money and people. Without a long-term plan that gives the Haitian people the opportunity to become independent of foreign aid, I don’t believe that much will change. This brings me to eduKenya.The model for eduKenya is something very different in my experience. Part of its mission is to become unnecessary, to literally make itself obsolete by creating self-sufficient schools in the slums of Nairobi. It is set apart from other foreign aid/mission groups by being run (in Kenya) by Kenyans who understand the social, political and spiritual issues in that part of the world better than we (Americans) ever could. Starting schools in some of the worst slums on the planet that educate and feed children and train their parents to be able to provide for their families is truly the Gospel at work. The philosophy that drives eduKenya is not to be a quick fix but to bring about incremental, deep seeded change. These changes may not be seen for a generation as the children in the Kwa Watoto school grow into adults with the potential to change their world. In Matthew chapter 13, Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower. At the end of the parable he says, “Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop – a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown”. I see the teachers and administrators at the school as farmers, planting seeds in good soil and praying for an abundant crop.I believe that eduKenya offers the type of long term solution that places like Mathare and Port-au-Prince so desperately need. As I think about where I should spend my time, talents and treasure I have come to believe it should be in an effort to bring people into the kind of freedom that can only come through access to food, water, a good education and the saving grace that we have in Jesus. It isn’t that we don’t need the large aid organizations with their ability to bring enormous resources to crisis situations, but more than that, we need people willing to act as farmers, to plant the seeds that may grow into a crop “a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown”.Tom FriedeleduKenya US Vision Team