Many sto­ries are pour­ing in about local char­i­ties mak­ing pledges of aid to earth­quake dev­as­tated Haiti. Tues­day, Haiti suf­fered a 7.0 Richter quake that destroyed the city of Port-au-Prince.

The Inter­na­tional Red Cross has set up a relief fund for Haiti. In this Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor story that we found at KMIR, writer Sara Miller Llana records a quote from the Red Cross and pro­vides one bright spot to the story.

Inter­na­tional Red Cross spokesman Paul Con­neally said an esti­mated 3 mil­lion peo­ple may have been affected by the quake and that it would take a day or two for a clear pic­ture of scope of the destruc­tion to emerge

Thou­sands of struc­tures – from gov­ern­ment and United Nations build­ings to the mil­lions of shacks that line the impov­er­ished nation’s cap­i­tal, Port-au-Prince – have been reduced to rub­ble.
…

Few coun­tries are as vul­ner­a­ble to nat­ural dis­as­ter as Haiti, the poor­est nation in the West­ern hemi­sphere. Wracked by polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity and poverty, and ham­mered by a series of hur­ri­canes in 2008, Haiti faces a tough recov­ery ahead. But as the nation digs itself out of the con­fu­sion and rub­ble, there is a bright spot: with the UN peace­keep­ing force already on the ground and an army of inter­na­tional aid orga­ni­za­tions with a long pres­ence in Haiti, recov­ery efforts might be more coor­di­nated and well-oiled than in other dis­as­ter zones.

“The good news is that there are many, many orga­ni­za­tions in Haiti,” says Eliz­a­beth Furst Frank, vice pres­i­dent of global pro­gram oper­a­tions at Ameri­Cares, which is send­ing med­ical aid to Haiti, where the US-based group has had a pres­ence for 25 years. “So you’ll see a faster response faster than in Myan­mar after the cyclone, because so many NGOs are well-established and will be respond­ing in any num­ber of ways.”

A char­ity from our home state of Michi­gan that started a orphan­age in Haiti says it is no longer stand­ing. WWMT talked to the Haiti Foun­da­tion Against Poverty.

Grand Rapids native Mallery Thur­low started the Haiti Foun­da­tion Against Poverty in 2006, work­ing to bring aware­ness and raise funds and supplies.

We spoke to her over the phone late Tues­day night as she was pack­ing up to head to the coun­try, hop­ing to get there this week­end to pro­vide aid.

She told us she has spo­ken to mul­ti­ple peo­ple there in Haiti and the destruc­tion is devastating.

An orphan­age her orga­ni­za­tion helped start has been lev­eled and some hand­i­capped chil­dren are stuck in side.

She’s unsure if the school they assist is still standing.

KY3 news in Spring­field, Mis­souri reprinted this press release from a local char­ity that is on their way to Port-au-Prince.

Con­voy of Hope is estab­lish­ing an emer­gency com­mand cen­ter just out­side the city of Port-au-Prince where food, water and sup­plies will be dis­trib­uted to vic­tims of the earth­quake that rocked Haiti on Tuesday.

“Our Haiti coun­try direc­tor is on the ground and we are work­ing closely with our part­ners to check on the chil­dren we feed and also to assist vic­tims with imme­di­ate needs,” says Hal Don­ald­son, founder and pres­i­dent of Con­voy of Hope. “We have a ware­house in Haiti and have food and sup­plies imme­di­ately avail­able to those in need. In the next few days sev­eral more con­tain­ers filled with relief sup­plies will be pre­pared and shipped imme­di­ately to Haiti.”

Ini­tial reports indi­cate that many build­ings, homes and walls top­pled under the strain of the earth­quake. Haiti is the poor­est coun­try in the West­ern Hemi­sphere. Many of its nearly 10 mil­lion res­i­dents live in abject poverty.

For sev­eral years Con­voy of Hope has worked in Haiti and cur­rently feeds 7,000 chil­dren there each day.

Finally, colum­nist Nicholas Kristof invokes a slo­gan from 9/11 and updates it to the dis­as­ter in Haiti.

After 9/11, the French news­pa­per Le Monde declared: We Are All Amer­i­cans. And after yesterday’s earth­quake: Today, we are all Haitians. No coun­try seems to have had worse luck with mis­rule, envi­ron­men­tal mis­man­age­ment, nat­ural dis­as­ters and poor gov­er­nance than Haiti. And now the earthquake.

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