These days Lori Carpenter's thoughts rarely stray from people she knows thousands of miles away in Haiti.

Work continues at her hydrology consulting firm in south Reno, but she works the phone and computer keeping an eye on an orphanage outside Port Au Prince.

Carpenter is on the board of directors of God's Littlest Angels orphanage and she's been trying to get some of its children out of the country and trying to get supplies in.

Today's news is good. Seventy eight children left for new homes in the U-S, making room for a few of the hundreds of thousands of new orphans created by the earthquake.

But Carpenter is also working on an idea that she thinks could change Haiti forever--bringing some Haitian high school students here to finish their education before returning to their homeland.

"We're hoping that some of these students would come to the U-S, see how we run our society, see how things are done both from a business, cultural and family standpoint and that they would be able to go home and want that for their own culture,"

It's an ambitious goal. Haiti was born of a slave revolt and has been literally paying the price for the past 2 centuries.

Saddled from the beginning by a crushing national debt imposed by its former French slave masters, cruelly served by a succession of corrupt dictators, it has remained the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Carpenter sees hope for a different Haiti rising from its ruins, inspired by a new generation of Haitians with stronger, more personal ties to its big neighbor to the north.

"We couldn't feed these people before the earthquake and we can't feed them now," she says. That it took this disaster, as sad as it was, maybe something good can come out of it. Maybe we can help haiti on to a sustainable future."

And she sees this happening, not through some big government program, but through individual families throughout the U-S opening their homes to individual students, much as they do now through exchange programs

The students would take some of our values home with them, Carpenter says, and ties forged during their stay would remain. "Those American families would also be invested in Haiti's future."