Once you have gathered the necessary items, call me at 801.259.6336 and we will arrange for FedEx to pick them up at your home or at a FedEx drop-off location. On your boxes, please CLEARLY mark them “Fill the Plane” so we know it is intended for this campaign!

"In the humanitarian world we talk about the disaster after the disaster," said the Rev. Kristin L. Sachen, head of UMCOR's International Disaster Response-- in other words, the shipping containers full of used items that have no practical use in the country or no designated recipients. These goods can swamp the local economy in a disaster-stricken region. "Relief agencies have to spend precious dollars to warehouse goods and hire personnel to manage the stuff," Rev. Sachen pointed out. Recent press reports cite the numbers of ports in the 600-mile swath of affected nations that are clogged with ships delivering piecemeal goods instead of being open for vital shipments of water, food, and medicine.

UMCOR's rule of thumb is, unless someone overseas has requested the specific items to be shipped, people should reconsider their impulse to give goods. But compassionate people do have options, Rev. Sachen said. "First, people can contribute kits to UMCOR-- health kits, school kits, layette kits and sewing kits," she said. "These are of uniform makeup, quality-controlled at the UMCOR Sager Brown depot by volunteers, and are the items we have learned are most useful under disaster situations cross-culturally," she explained.

Cash gifts will help UMCOR continue to support local Christian relief agencies in the disaster area that are known and trusted. "They are the agencies to which the local Methodists belong," she said. "In India and Sri Lanka they are providing saris and dhotas-- terms for culturally appropriate clothing-- lentils and oil, household utensils, plastic sheeting, and blankets to over 50,000 families."

[T]he aid was stacking up. In an airport hangar in Medan, 280 miles south of Banda Aceh, thousands of boxes of basics such as drinking water, crackers and blankets had accumulated since Monday and were going nowhere.

"Hundreds of tons, it keeps coming in," said Rizal Nordin, governor of Northern Sumatra province. He blamed the backlog on an initial "lack of coordination" that was slowly improving.