Haiti

[ailbhe]

I assume those of you who can donate - £1 or £5 or whatever - have already worked out where and how to do so. I almost donated yesterday morning and then remembered Gift Aid and waited for Rob to come home as he pays income tax so using his details means they get about 25% extra.

Money can't solve the problem, but it surely caused it, and donations (as distinct from loans) will help a lot. There's not much else we can do from here anyway.

Comments

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

Yup, done, with GiftAid. I didn't do a huge amount of research in who to give via, being in a hurry and reckoning that any reasonable organisation with people on the ground could use all the support they could get, but plumped for MSF as I'd heard on R4 that they were there already.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

MSF is one of the charities we support through a regular monthly donation. I'm quite convinced that any money going to them is going to do a lot of good in Haiti. I was very pleased to hear that they already had teams in Haiti - but distressed to find out that some of their clinics were among the buildings that collapsed - so they are currently trying to find un-collapsed bits of hospitals and clinics to set up operating theaters in *shudder*

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

In addition to the Red Cross and MSF, for UK based people, the The Disasters Emergency Committee is a good address for donations because they centralise the money and distribute it between the 13 member charities. They also specialise in rapid response, which is super important because money taking a long way to get to where it's needed is a complication people in Haiti really don't need right now. They can be found at http://www.dec.org.uk/index.html.

It's also a good idea to donate to Oxfam right now; once the acute medical emergency subsides (sadly because so many people will have died), there will be a lot of homelss and destitute people, and Oxfam are working already to get supplies of shelter building materials, water purifiying eqipment and the like to ship out to Haiti as soon as the rescue and medical teams have cleared through the airport in Port au Prince. http://www.oxfam.org.uk/ will get you where you're going.

(Sorry for highjacking your journal Ailbhe but you have a bigger LJ readership than me so I thought that just in case people are still wondering what to do, this may be helpful)

Oh and by the way: yes, giving money is all we can do right now and it might not seem like enough in the face of the shortage of nurses, doctors, policemen and firefighters on the ground in Haiti. But the country doesn't have the infrastructure to support thousands of well meaning white people in need of already critically short food and water, and the airports are clogged and struggling to accept the air convoys that are already en route. So giving moeny isn't the lame option in this case, it's actually one of the most important things that need to be done.

[ailbhe]

We actually can't afford much right now but come payday I expect we'll be going again.

My *children* want to go there and start digging. My main urge is to go and start a bucket chain along the roads from the airport... but that's all crazy. We aren't strong, we burn easily, we're not trained, and we eat and drink too much, and we can't operate on people.

Orthopaedic surgeons, now they're needed, even if they are white and thirsty...

[ailbhe]

We went for MSF because they are already setting up operating theatres among the ruins, so are probably well-placed to use what they can get. If they can get any of it out of the damn airport.

[divulge.livejournal.com]

Thanks; this was useful! And thanks for posting, Ailbhe.

[taimatsu]

Yes, I have given a little (Red Cross UK as it was one of the first that came up and I was in a DO THIS RIGHT NOW frame of mind, and then I tried to do MSF as well but Natwest thought my card was being used fraudulently, hah) and will give more when I'm paid in a week or two.

It's such a horrible thing.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

I really hope you're not feeling criticised - all I meant was that, impotent as it might make us feel, every little we can donate is a net good. However small. Even £1 can buy a few litres of water, and who knows whose lives those few litres night not save?

[ailbhe]

Oh, no - helpless, not criticised. My instincts are also telling me to adopt all the displaced Haitian babies. This would not help them. There will be lots of much more suitable people to adopt them. So I should send them more money.

It just doesn't feel like I'm doing much.

At least I haven't been watching the news or videos on websites.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Yeah I've been feeling helpless. And so fucking *useless*, too. I'm scaling new heights of self flagellation guilt - this morning I was looking at Alan's recycling bin and feeling guilty about the resources and energy that went into making that plastic box and into collecting our rubbish and disposing of it, when other people in the world would, like, be glad to have that to *live* under, let alone put their non-existent surplus into...

Gah. I'm trying not to sink into complete paralising nihilism, and not watching TV does help. Still hard though. One monet I'm like "you can't do any good there, you need to stay put and do what you can" and the next I'm all "you lazy coward! why aren't you working around the clock feeding all those hungry children???"

[ailbhe]

You don't know what to feed them, or how, for a start.

I'm beginning to get quite cross with journalists for not carrying aid-boxes around to give stuff to everyone they see.