As we all know, there is a MASSIVE crisis in Haiti right now. As a social worker (and a person in general), I immediately wanted to fly to Haiti and help out in any way I could. However, the Center for International Disaster Information has put out the following statement:
"Volunteers without prior disaster relief experience are generally not selected for relief assignments. Candidates with the greatest chance of being selected have fluency in the language of the disaster-stricken area, prior disaster relief experience, and expertise in technical fields such as medicine, communications logistics, water/sanitation engineering. In many cases, these professionals are already available in-country. Most agencies will require at least ten years of experience, as well as several years of experience working overseas. "(Center for International Disaster Information)
This, of course, makes a lot of sense, and will probably filter out most of us from going to Haiti right now (because, my guess is that they don't have time to train unskilled volunteers). The best thing we can do is to make sure that the people who have the expertise to help have enough supplies, etc. to do their jobs.
InterAction has a helpful website listing agencies that are providing relief funds to Haiti. (AVOID SCAMS, CHECK OUT ALL AGENCIES BEFORE DONATING)
And, probably the easiest way to help is to text "HAITI" to "90999," which will donate $10 to the Red Cross, charged to your phone bill.
I like your blog but this Haiti response thing ticks me off. Over 25,000 children under age 5 die preventable deaths every fucking day. Where are the social workers (and people in general) that they need ? Even if 200,000 die in Haiti it will only equal 8 days of preventable deaths of young children.And the Haiti deaths are not all preventable.They are too poor to build earthquake resistant housing for the quakes which come every 200 years or so.They can make wiser choices in construction but their money would be better allocated to primary health care than earthquake-proof buildings.I support helping them through this emergency but there is something Pavlovian about the way people respond to these issues. If the media corporations ring the bell and choose to show terrible images
ReplyDelete(Haiti-Katrina-that tsunami thing) then everyone starts frantically posturing to show their concern and keep their group status as a socially correct person who is concerned about the things that they are supposed to be concerned about. But if the media corporations do NOT ring the bell (25,000 children a day dying PREVENTABLE deaths) then almost all of those socially correct people couldn't care less. Most media corporations are driven by ratings and people do not want starving, disease-ridden children on their TV screens every day. They would rather watch something else.Public media corporations such as PBS, NPR, BBC etc. do not have that excuse which is why they are the most despicable of the lot.
END OF RANT !