I was listening to KPFk and they said that foreign aid was making a dent in Haiti's fucked up condition. but what do you mean by the strings?
Many of the issues raised in this thread have USAID as a greater part of the problem then the solution.
By strings I mean as was stated earlier, the US will pledge X amount of dollars to the relief fund, of which only a portion will ever be sent.
Of the money that is allocated for disaster relief in Haiti, it will come with stipulations on how the money can be used. The stipulations in the AID will make sure that well connected American companies (Bechtel, Haliburton, etc) will have the best chance of being awarded an inflated contract for repairing infrastructure and other projects that will be undertaken because of the opportunity provided by this disaster.
So essentially, the money does a quick round trip right back into American corporations pockets.
The real problem arises when AID is pledged with interest stipulations, or the projects that are built require large sums of money to maintain, of which the receiving country does not have the money to support. What good is a state of the art water treatment facility when you don't have the educated population to run it, nor the budget to support its million dollar overhead. Where does that workforce and money come from?
We are right back in the "we need money from the US" again, which will be ever so happy to lend it with the proper financial or access to resource strings attached.