Sean Penn shows how aid can help Haiti.

I have an awful lot of time for Sean Penn. He doesn't just speak out when he sees things which are wrong, but he actually gets off his ass and rolls up his sleeves and does something. I read recently in Vanity fair about the astonishing work he is doing in Haiti and The Independent are also covering this today.

The life of a Hollywood star isn't all red carpets and luxury hotels. Not if you're Sean Penn, who woke at sunrise yesterday in a tiny tent on a mosquito-infested hillside overlooking the city of Port-au-Prince, rolled up the sleeves of a filthy shirt, holstered his Glock pistol, and set about trying to make life better for some of the two million people left homeless by the earthquake that hit Haiti's capital six months ago.

Penn's been doing the same thing virtually every day since late January, when he heard singing coming from an open-air church on the fairways of a ruined golf course in Pétionville, once one of the city's most affluent neighbourhoods. After wandering over to take a look, he decided it would be an ideal location for his newly created J/P Haiti Relief Organisation to build a camp for displaced victims of the worst natural disaster in modern history.

Today, that camp is home to more than 50,000 people, making it one of the biggest of the tent cities in Haiti, where the earthquake on 12 January destroyed about 280,000 buildings, killing 300,000 people and leaving – at a conservative estimate – a million and a half more without homes.

He is now responsible for a camp housing more than 50,000 people. And, from all the reports, Penn's camps are run better than any of the others.

Walk around Camp Penn and you will notice more schools, more hospitals, more latrines, and more water stations than at any of the 1,300 similar tent cities that dot the country. The camp is tidier (they have daily litter collection), safer (you see regular police patrols) and better designed than any other. Its inhabitants may not have their lives back yet – not by a long way – but they at least feel as if things might be heading in the right direction.

"The difference between this camp and all the others? Where do I start?" asks Florian Blaser, a German doctor with Médicins Sans Frontières who has worked at facilities across the country. "There are no gangs roaming the streets. There are plenty of hospitals, so people have proper access to doctors. Children have at least four schools to choose from. You go to other places, and the earthquake victims are just existing. Here, they are thriving. There's a real sense of community."

I really take my hat off to this guy. People like myself sit behind keyboards and talk of what should be happening, but someone like Penn gets off his ass and gets himself personally involved. For no reward other than the knowledge that he is doing the right thing.

And he appears to be doing it better than anyone else.

The thinking behind Penn's approach isn't just about spending money wisely. It also reflects a desire, surprisingly rare in the aid industry, to be seen as something approaching an equal by people he helps. Traditional agencies might parachute into disaster zones with aid deliveries, and then vanish for days. Penn strongly believes that he can only help a community if he lives in it and understands what makes it tick.

"It's a family here," says Alistair Lamb, a former RAF officer from Balham who is co-director of Penn's camp. "Sean is the visionary behind this, and his big thing from the start has been that he wants to retain cohesion, and a sense of community, and eventually to return people to where they came from. We are not a colonising force. We sleep in tents, just like them. We don't live in houses miles away. Those kinds of things make a big difference. They mean we understand the place, and can make better decisions because of it."

I am quite sure that the morons over at Fox News will find it easy to mock what Penn is doing, but to 50,000 Haitians this man is making their current nightmare slightly more bearable. And he doesn't have to do that. He really does deserve our admiration.

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Tags: Sean Penn, Haiti