I also think people have unrealistic expectations of how much things cost. It costs a lot to ship water, medicine, food. I used to work for a company that used to ship Aid supplies and you would be shocked at how much it costs to ship enough water for 1000 people for just a week. We are often talking about water for 10s of thousands and we are talking over a year. Places like Haiti have severe infrastructure issues. This makes transportation costs far more expensive that otherwise would have been as most things cannot be shipped entirely by land, they must be shipped by air. The country was leveled in the earthquake. It is likely that most of the towns/cities will be abandoned rather than rebuilt just because of the sheer scale of the effort and the lack of money in that country.
Haiti has a lot of other problems too. It has been the centre of corruption for years and it's not all the fault of the Haiti government. The US have had a massive hand in it too. Their history is pretty pitiful. The people there know nothing but eeking out an existence and fighting among each other. It makes Haiti a dangerous country and getting aid out problematic.
Japan's a little different. Japan has similar problems where getting aid to hard hit areas is difficult because of the damage. However the country has a lot of infrastructure in place already, we are already seeing them hard at work repairing buildings, roads, cleaning up. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and the costs of feeding them is exorbitant. You can see you aid money at work each time you see a displaced persons centre on the TV.
It's interesting to point out though, that while people complain about the UK being able to give money yet it has a deficit to cover, Kabul donated $50,000 in Aid to Japan after the Earthquake. It doesn't sound like much, but Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. It can barely feed it's own population, and yet with an out pouring of sympathy for the humanitarian crisis that happened in Japan, they still managed to find something to donate. It speaks of the human spirit I think.
We don't donate as much as we should. I tend to like organisations like https://www.kiva.org/ which is more about getting people in the third world on their feet by providing them with a full or partial loan, to support their business. It gives a better sense of satisfaction and you can see your donation at work. I also like https://www.presentaid.org/ which means you can actually physically purchase something with your money. It probably just gets swallowed into a big hole but it is something a little bit more substantial than just giving money.
