How to help Haiti. Meaning, how you should help. Short answer: give money, not canned goods or other bullshit. And try not to restrict your giving to the present catastrophe, because preventative measures for future disasters leverage your gift. (Another way to look at it: lots of people are going to give for this disaster. Caring visionaries have the guts to look beyond today.) Anyway. You can text “HAITI” to “90999” to have a $10 charge applied to your phone bill and sent to the Red Cross, which is fine if you’re cheap and lazy I guess. I’d suggest giving how much you think you can really afford, giving to an established organization such as the Red Cross, Oxfam, or Doctors Without Borders, and not directing your money specifically towards this incident, so the charity is free to use the overflow towards tomorrow’s good works once they do what they can about the present emergency. You also need to take a long-term interest in Haiti, and lobby your congressperson to do right towards it. Remember that Haiti was in dire straights even before yesterday, when all you could think about was Conan O’Brien and the fucking weather.
13 thoughts on “How to help Haiti”
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F U, Alesh! As one of the lazy cheap bastards who only donated $10 by text (today, anyway), I take a wee bit of offense from your commentary. Times are tough for a lot of us here, and $10 is not necessarily being cheap. I make a frakkin great paycheck, but given that multiple members of my extended family are out of work and having trouble, I am scaling back so I can help THEM. And yet, I want to do something, so $10 it is. People can also text a measly $5 to Wyclef’s charity, Yele.org. This encourages widespread giving from people who might not ordinarily be so inclined, and that’s a fantastic start.
Also, for a lot of us, Haitian immigrants are our friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. who still have close ties to the country and therefore we DO think about what’s going on down there on a fairly regular basis (and any island neighbor whose residents regularly raft up to our shores, or die trying, deserves our attention). Don’t be so curmudgeonly! Instead, encourage giving, at any level.
God revealed his wrath this week, and only fools would ignore His warning. Sending money to Haiti now is the equivalent of petitioning Hell for early admission. Send me the money instead. Repent!
I wanna know how Pat Robertson knows how Haiti made a pact with The Devil. Was it all of Haiti together, or one representative? How could that one representative bind all the citizens of Haiti, who might be wary of a dude with a pitchfork and horns (I can only picture “The Devil” this way, or maybe like Jon Lovitz). Was Pat Robertson there at the time? Did he participate in the negotiations? Was he the one wearing The Devil costume? If getting rid of the French was what Haiti got, what did The Devil get in return?
good thing we have the blogosphere to remind us whats really important
From the NY Times Blog, “The Lede”:
Update | 9:31 a.m. A company in Miami, Give On The Go, which is working with Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti foundation to make it possible for Americans to donate money via text message writes to say that the effort “has raised more than $750,000 in donations for the catastrophe since going live on Tuesday evening and now aims to raise over $1 million a day as part of its grass-roots SMS text drive.”
Water Closet: I know about that pact because God told me. If you listened to the voices in your head the way I do, you would know too — especially if you sent me money.
The Bible is filled with stories detailing God’s vengeance, where he wiped out entire villages as punishment for the sins of a few. That’s just Holy Efficiency at work.
Too bad about the babies maimed or killed, but maybe that’s the sort of thing they should have thought about in the 19th century when they made the pact. They’ll know for next time, and if you’re smart, you will, too.
You can thank me by sending a check. To me.
ALL HAIL JEEBUS! My check is in the mail.
For Alesh: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/14/online.donat…
I’m pretty sure even in these hard times we can all afford more than we are affording.
No Adam, not all of us. For real. I mean I guess I COULD stop paying my mortgage, car payment, insurance, telecommunications stuff, sewer & sanitation bill, water bill, electrical bill, student loans, peanut butter, jelly, and bread, and stop sending money to out-of-work family. Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea. You first.
On the other hand, it makes me feel good that me and hundreds of thousand of other people were able to put together millions of dollars in a short period of time. That pays for a lot of water, transportation, and medical supplies.
yes, all of us.
I roll my eyes at you.
I roll my eyes at BOTH of you. The level of charitable giving in this country is pathetic: even the lowly Hebrews understood that the proper level of giving was “tithing,” or 10%. To the church, of course. Meaning: me.
Ow! Dad-gum eye-rolling gave me a headache.
Reverend, will this 10% guarantee my salvation? Can you put that in writing? Also, what’s involved in the so-called salvation? Is hell not a hipper joint to crash in the afterlife? I think Tom Cruise and Xenu said they can guarantee immortality and space travel, so you’ve got to do better than that.