Haiti Earthquake Relief
How can we respond to the needs of the people of Haiti?
The massive earthquake that struck near the capital of Port-au-Prince has caused enormous destruction and suffering to the nation considered the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti was still recovering from a series of deadly hurricanes when the quake struck this week. The death of the Archbishop and the collapse of the cathedral add additional loss to a nation that is 80% Catholic.
Catholic Relief Services has an established presence in Haiti and is an extremely competent and trustworthy agency to conduct relief operations. They have an A+ rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy (www.charitywatch.org).
Donations to Catholic Relief Services can be done online: www.crs.org
by telephone: 1-800-736-3467 between the hours of 8am and 11pm Eastern Standard Time
by mail: Catholic Relief Services, P.O. Box 17090, Baltimore, MD 21203-7090
Some other relief organizations receiving an A rating are CARE, Church World Service, Doctors
Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres), Lutheran World Relief, and the United States Fund for UNICEF.
We are urged to be aware of the possibility of unscrupulous people taking advantage of this crisis for personal gain. The following information provides some help in making certain that your donation reaches the people of Haiti:
Beware of bogus online ‘help’ for Haiti
“Past tragedies and natural disasters have prompted individuals with criminal intent to solicit contributions purportedly for a charitable organization or a good cause,” the FBI said, in passing along these tips:
- Ignore unsolicited e-mails, and do not click on links within those messages.
- Be skeptical of individuals representing themselves as surviving victims or officials asking for donations via e-mail or social networking sites.
- Be cautious of e-mails that claim to show pictures of the disaster areas in attached files, because the files may contain computer viruses. Open attachments only from known senders.
- Decline to give personal or financial information to anyone who solicits contributions.
- Make contributions directly to known organizations, rather than relying on others who claim in e-mails that they will channel the donation to established groups.
The FBI says anyone receiving an e-mail that appears to be a scam should forward it to this website: www.ic3.gov
Thank you for your generosity and your prayers.
Cathy, will the funds collected for Haiti from parishioners of Nativity Church be given to Catholic Relief Services to dispense?
Yes, we will send our collection to CRS, as I believe all of the Catholic churches in the diocese will do. They have over 300 workers already in place in Haiti, and although their building was damaged, it was not destroyed. They are waiting for some type of structural analysis before they make use of their building again.
wow go figure
Hi there, I’m using Edubuntu Linux 8.1 and the Dillo 1.9 web browser, and your site looks rather screwed up. Might want to look into it. Peace!
Yes, I agree
Hi – very great site you have established. I enjoyed reading this posting. I did want to write a comment to tell you that the design of this site is very aesthetically delightful. I used to be a graphic designer, now I am a copy editor in chief for a merchandising firm. I have always enjoyed working with computing machines and am attempting to learn code in my spare time (which there is never enough of lol).
I recently decided to give for earthquake in Haiti. I encourage that you give to those affected by this earthquake too.
Besides donating my own money to Haiti, I will continue to pray for them. Lifting everything up to Heaven for them.
Absolutely great information. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Greetings. I hope you dont care me commenting here. I would like to contact you but I couldn’t find your contact infomation. I wanted to subscribe to your blog but I unable to find your RSS subscription link… thank you…
I wish more people were like Mr. George Clooney. What he has done to help the Haitian people is just amazing. So many of the Hollywood celebrities are just phonies looking for publicity. George is one of the true greats.
Renna,
We do have an RSS subscribe. It is listed as the subscribe link under the navigation bar.
I know it is not the best, so I will work on making a more visible RSS subscribe in the near future.
I greatly appreciate your feedback!
Pit,
I wish I could take credit for the them, but that goes to bavotsian.com who designed the Magazine Basic Theme for WordPress.
It is a free theme with great support and updates.
gahoachma@gmail.com,
I am sorry you are having issues with the site. While I have not tested it on Dillo 1.9, I have tested this site on FireFox, Opera, and IE8 with no problems. I have also tested on my Unbutu Linux box. The theme is XHTLM and CSS certified.
I will do some research and see if I can recreate your issue. It might be a browser specific issue, which may or may not be correctable on our end.
I sometimes find browser problems with websites, so I will switch between Firefox and IE8. I believe you can install Firefox on your Linux system if it doesn’t already.