Live in Barbados

If you haven’t donated yet, watch this:

Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Montage from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo.

Google have published a page covering many options for folks wanting to donate funds to help with the situation in Haiti.

On January 12, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. Join recovery efforts mobilizing around the world to assist earthquake victims. Your donation will help disaster victims rebuild their lives and their communities. Google will also donate $1 million to help organizations provide relief.

via Support Disaster Relief in Haiti.

A very good friend mine wrote these words in the form of a letter which he is sending to various Canadian newspaper editors. I’m quoting him here because I also find that people are far too quick to recommend prayer as a viable solution in many of the articles I read about the situation in Haiti.

The tears flow freely this morning as I watch the devastation that is Haiti. But my tears and blood begin to boil when I hear seemingly every report end with the refrain that we all must pray for the people of Haiti.

This is no time to pray.

This is a time to ask why nine million people are living on a patch of ground fit for a half million. Time to ask why more than half of the tropical island of Hispaniola is a treed paradise and the remainder is a dust wasteland – and why the line between the two is visible from space. It’s time to ask the Pope, who has the gall to ask us all to donate, what the issue is again with the targeted use of some delicate rubber or other means of contraception.

Its time to review humanity’s relation to its landbase. What happens when the population exceeds the carrying capacity of given patch of land. What happens in Afghanistan? What happens in Somalia? In Yemen? Gaza? Rwanda? Chad? Do people deforest the land of whatever fuel energy remains, build the hovels that poverty allows and die under the rubble with the first gust of wind or shaking of the ground? If they are lucky, yes. If they are not, the machetes, machine guns, or rape gangs get them or turn them into child soldiers for the next round of horror.

It is time to face up to the fact that praying is not producing results. We prayed for Haiti four times lately when hurricanes decimated that country while leaving other countries that still had trees to hold the hillsides. Those prayers, if heard, were answered with a 7.0 quake.

This is no time to pray.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck southern Haiti on Tuesday, knocking down buildings and inflicting a new catastrophe on the impoverished Caribbean nation, its ambassador to the United States said.The quake struck about 15 km 10 miles southwest of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince shortly before 5 p.m. Joseph said he had little information about the extent of damage from the quake, but one government official — the only one he was able to reach — told him houses had crumbled “on the right side of the street and the left side of the street.”

via Appeals for aid after quake strikes Haiti – CNN.com.