Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Haiti needs our help





courtesy: AP




"Today, we are all Haitians" -- Nicolas Kristoff

Haiti has experienced the worst disaster in its history with a 7.0 earthquake centered 10 miles from Port-Au-Prince.  My friend Ophelia Dahl is the co-founder of Partners In Health (along with Dr Paul Farmer) which has been actively working in Haiti. They have teams on the ground there now and I urge everyone to donate something, even a few dollars, if you can.

The people of Haiti have so very little and now they have even less.

From Ophelia:

Our teams in Haiti and Boston are coordinating our response as we speak. We are still learning more about the situation in Port au Prince, but we have accounted for our teams at our sites. We are posting updates on our website here http://www.pih.org/inforesources/news/Haiti_Earthquake.html.
As you have heard, the devastation is widespread. We have readied our clinics to receive patients and are working on a coordinated medical response. Our medical director is en route to Haiti via the DR and we are mobilizing to set up a secure site as a staging area for our response. The best thing you can do to help us at this time is to forward our email updates, the link to our website at www.pih.org, and get the word out to your friends to donate to PIH.


Read about Dr Paul Farmer, subject of Tracy Kidder's Mountains beyond Mountains, on Miss Whistle here, here and here.

For other ways to donate (via American Red Cross, Unicef, Oxfam, Save the Children etc) click on this Huffington Post link.





1 comment:

So Lovely said...

Life can be so cruel sometimes - such a poor country, its people struggling every day and then even more devastated with a earthquake such as this. A friend spent last year in Haiti, building another hospital for Partners In Health.
I have donated through Doctors With Borders which is stationed there also. I think we are only seeing the beginnings of what really went on there. xxx
P.S. Mountains beyond Mountains is a beautiful book which I treasure. xx