We’ve all heard tell of the incredibly devastating earthquake that struck Port Au Prince, Haiti and surrounding areas just about a week ago. Some of us have friends or relatives who are there, as residents or as aid workers. Every day, we see images and hear stories of death, severe injury, fear, and chaos that most of us will never be able to imagine living through, but which hundreds of thousands are experiencing in Haiti. Some of those who escape the rubble will make a full recovery, but many of them will not, in part due to the poverty the country experienced prior to the quake and the lack of certain medical services they are still facing.
It is easy to feel helpless about all this, and many of us cannot go to Haiti right now to lend a hand. However, we can all (or nearly all of us can) pitch in a few dollars or the equivalent of a few hours’ work at our jobs to collectively make a huge difference in the relief effort and save many people’s lives. In doing so, we rediscover our own humanity and touch someone else’s life in a way we seldom realize that we can, and we put a brick back into the foundation of a largely destroyed nation of people not so unlike ourselves. I am asking all of you to help with your cash donation or personal effort to help feed, medicate, and rebuild Haiti. Please ask your friends and loved ones to do the same.
Don’t have much free time? You can make a donation from your phone, which will be added to your next bill, by sending an SMS text message. If you live in the U.S.,
- Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief efforts
- Text “HAITI” to 20222 to donate $10 to the William J. Clinton Foundation’s Haiti Relief Fund
- Text “YELE” and send to 501501 to Donate $5 to Yele Haiti’s Earthquake Relief efforts
- Text “GIVE10″ to 20222 to donate $10 to Direct Relief International
Click on one of the links below to make a tax-deductible donation on the Web to a charitable organization doing work in Haiti right now:
You can keep abreast of new stories and interviews out of Haiti on NPR.org. For more general information about the earthquake or to help map Haiti for rescuers, visit Google’s Haiti Earthquake page.
You can research charity ratings at CharityNavigator.com and CharityWatch.org. Also consider this article, which includes some caveats on financial report-based charity rating systems.
I write this behalf of only myself, with no personal connection to Haiti in the sense that it’s a very foreign place to me, but a very personal one because I cannot just watch this sort of devastation trample scores of people without trying to assist in some way. Thanks to all of you who are with me.