It wasn't long after Dave Chatterton learned about Haiti's catastrophic earthquake that his phone began to ring.

The Salt Lake Community College nursing student, a former missionary to Haiti who is fluent in French and Haitian Creole, said he took calls from several aid groups and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. All wanted him onboard as they deployed to Haiti to help in the wake of an earthquake that had leveled much of Port-au-Prince.

But more than two weeks after the quake, Chatterton is resigned to watching news coverage of the disaster from his Taylorsville home.

He's not alone. Aid groups say the number of qualified people who wish to volunteer in Haiti far exceeds the number that can safely travel to east Hispaniola at this time.

The crush of volunteers is due partly to the overwhelming number of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) ensconced in Haiti. The tiny Carribean country has the second-highest number of NGOs per capita in the world, according to a recent Newsweek guest editorial written by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

NGOs can be competitive, creating unnecessary bottlenecks in getting relief to those in need. On the other hand, their combined resources could pay off later in a coordinated effort to rebuild Haiti, Clinton said in the editorial.

That's of little consolation to people like Danna Richards, a pediatric nurse who, on the day of her departure with the newly formed relief group Utah Hospital Task Force, was turned away due to the flight being over capacity.

"It's sad. I really wanted to help, and this was probably my one shot," said Richards. "It was hard convincing my employer to give me the time off."

And that's to say nothing of people, like Chatterton, who simply haven't been able to rearrange their home front obligations to free themselves to go.

Chatterton has been unsuccessful in his attempts to arrange for a change in the clinical hours needed to graduate from his program at SLCC. SLCC officials say they certainly haven't told Chatterton he can't go, but they can't guarantee that the time he spends in Haiti would fulfill the same requirements as the supervised surgical nursing experiences he would be missing at the University of Utah Medical Center's Intensive Care Unit and the Salt Lake County jail, where his clinical hours were scheduled months in advance.

Those hours will be completed in mid-February. And Chatterton -- who travels with aid groups to Haiti almost every year -- said he intends to be on the next plane out of town.

"I feel like I'm needed," he said. "But there's nothing I can do right now. It's so hard to just sit here and watch."