I am going to beat this horse to death. It was 6 or seven days before some, and I doubt all, got anything at all..saw anything at all. Doctors had no medicines, bandages etc. Our paranoia about clogging up airports and docks should be measured against what is really coming in..if there are military organizations, known relief organizations, then give them priority. Tell the others to find other landing zones. But if absolutely nothing is coming in, let in the church groups etc...there are all sorts of hazards...including kidnapping children...but if they are perhaps escorted by local contacts...they do not need to clog up the roads...the road I saw on TV had no traffic whatsoever..a few dozen trucks would not have held anything up.

Someone has to be in charge, and has to have forseen some of the problems. Probably this would be military. It might be a foreign military. LThere lmust be martial law. There must be armed guards. But to stop people delivering goods themselves..and they are very likely to bring what is most needed such as tarps, food, water, is to condemn survivors to death. Either from thirst or freezing to death or in hot climates, diseases brought about by human and animal carcasses. You have one type of problem..chaos, which can be controlled...if you allow people to bring in what they have..and perhaps it is only an overrun of 50,000 teddy bears (and I saw a picture of a child in a makeshift hospital and a teddy bear would not have been amiss). You have another sort of problem..death, a feeling of desparation that no one knows or cares...if you wait until groups get organized enough..which seems to take about a week....it is too long to wait. People die in the meantime who could have been saved. Maybe water will only reach the coast, but it might give those on the coast enough strength to travel inland with medicine..who knows...

I say get what you can how you can when you can. Give money if you can. Give your old T-shirts and unmatched socks if you are close enough and have no money. It does not mean that dogooders have to get in the way of professionals. They need to be told the second Red Cross or the military shows up, get out of the way. Move to another area of need. It is not all or nothing.

Some of those goods we are so paranoid about would have been welcome during the best of times because the people are so poor...in a desparate situation they will have many uses, will be used to get medicine in a black market, etc.

I think Taiwan is about 800 miles and Hong COng about the same....Australia is several thousand miles...you have to react immediately, especially with water. A week is too long for poeple to live.