On January 21, 2009 the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) announced they are contributing $550,000 to provide relief to Haiti earthquake victims. $500,000 dollars will be donated to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, an organization that is providing immediate life saving assistance as well as long-term support in Haiti.
A $50,000 contribution has already been made to The Harvest For Haiti, founded by a 2007 winner of REALTOR® Magazine’s Good Neighbor Awards, Patrick Moore. Moore’s humanitarian outreach program in Haiti supports orphans, delivers clean water and provides medical care to more than 3,500 people a year. Harvest For Haiti has distributed thousands of doses of antibiotics, installed more than 450 water filter systems and drilled two wells. More says, “In one village where we used to see huge amounts of malaria-associated anemia, we no longer see it,”
On a personal note….
I spent 2 months in Haiti as a teenager assisting in a medical clinic, and working on a building to house livestock for an ongoing food supply. One of the biggest struggles we had all summer was clean water. The infrastructure there was virtually non-existent; roads, hospitals, communication and yes – even clean water was not a staple of life there before the quake for a majority of the population. I can’t imagine what they are dealing with now adding the devastation of this earthquake.
It’s a long haul….
Do you remember how long (months) it took to clean up the debris from the Tragedy of 9/11? How long we were digging and looking for people? We had expert, heavy equipment, an organized, readily available work force that was fed and hydrated and trained for rescue, expert methods of communication to assist in organizing the efforts. We had roads, fully staffed hospitals. How long did it take us to recover from the devastation in New Orleans…? Did anyone ever how to stop and think, “will we be able to feed the victims?”, “will we have water for those that are searching?” The Haitians have virtually nothing of substance to deal with this historic tragedy. In fact, they have virtually nothing on top of lacking so many of the basic needs of life. Please remember to pray and give and support the people of Haiti and those people able to go and assist. If they don’t have us….what do they have?
Below are some ways to support the efforts of Haiti.
- Red Cross Haiti Relief
- Food For The Hungry
- Matt Cutts has an excellent blog post, Ways To Help Haiti, that includes donation sites, google maps imagery, information articles, etc.
- On twitter I follow: @wyclef @firesideint @AnnCurry
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