I’ve mentioned before how hard it is to keep up with relief efforts for the string of major disasters in the past year or so, and because so many of the relief and aid organizations tend to be the same for each disaster–and recent constant experience has made them (presumably) the best prepared to help–I’ve been referring people to the old lists I put together back during the Haiti and Chile earthquakes.
But the current news out of Pakistan is bleak, to say the least. The aid that we are trusting to arrive in Pakistan is apparently slow in arriving, or not arriving at all, and the situation there is getting terrifying.
Fortunately, a friend of mine posted a request on her Facebook asking for reliable aid organizations, similar to my own request back during the Haiti days, and some of her friends in turn came through with this excellent list on the blog Secular Pakistan. Please check it out and consider sending help through one of those organizations.
Also, don’t forget about the needs of other people the world over. Even while we worry about the pace of relief efforts in Pakistan, other news reports are whispering in the media background that efforts to rebuild Haiti have all but stopped, and I’m not even sure anymore what the situation is like in China or Tibet. One of the problems with so much tragic news covering so many countries is that we tend to move on to the next news cycle and forget about the desperate needs of the people we once sought to help. Please, if you can–and I know it’s getting hard–continue working for the people in Haiti, Chile, Tibet, China, and other regions that continue to need our help.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 