While Don Cherry's comments about the amount of money spent on international aid to Haiti provoked much gnashing of teeth in the international development community, he does raise a pretty pertinent question: What is the value of Canada's contribution to international aid and development?

For well over a decade CIDA has been pushed from pillar to post, reeling from the constant shifting of priorities and reductions in funding. Quietly, and with sadness, the agency has watched many of its key personnel leave in favour of more imaginative posts in the United Nations or the NGO field.

In Django Unchained, the protagonist makes the fictional journey from slavery to freedom in the Antebellum Southern U.S. circa 1858. As President Obama reminded us, Tuesday marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation which announced the end of slavery in the USA in 1863. Toussaint L'Ouverture played the leading role in the real-life drama alongside and his revolutionary army of self-emancipated barefoot slaves, defeating the three great empires of the eighteenth century -- Spain, England, and France -- and finally winning independence after a decade of toil.

In this edition of One On One, Mansbridge does a competent job debriefing the distinguished CBC foreign correspondent Susan Ormiston, back in London after her latest foreign assignment. So why do journalists like Susan Ormiston volunteer to go to all these places where people kill each other, and too often kill journalists who might as well have targets painted on their flak jackets?

On the earthquake's second anniversary, the media did their minimum due diligence. They did not report on the hundreds of thousands of Haitians like the Metellus family who remain scattered across Haiti's rural landscape -- the forgotten displaced people.

A few months after the earthquake, physiotherapist Mike Landry returned to Haiti to check back in on his patients and help them return home. To this day, rubble still covers the streets of Haiti and it is shocking to see. For someone with mobility issues, it is very difficult to get around.

Upon returning to Haiti, the contingent that really caught my eye was the army of young males on motorbikes, riding with the cockiness of immaturity exacerbated by the frustration of travel on Haiti's miserable roads.

The crisis in East Africa has prompted Canadians to open their wallets and their hearts, but with the sheer number of government agencies, NGOs and private sector organizations responding to humanitarian crises, it remains difficult to know who to support and how much of the money will actually get there.

Catastrophe sparks attention and piques donor interest. We must help now; every aid agency is grateful for the urgent assistance. But too often after the travelling media circus packs up, donor dollars dry up and nonprofits don't have the means to build sustainable infrastructure.