Three weeks after quake, Haitians still need basics: SAS community raises almost $100,000

by Jamie Lim

Haitians stand in line for earthquake relief (food and water) being handed out by the U.S. Army Soldiers with Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment. Photo by Sergeant Jeremy Lock

The same day, two sisters from Pennsylvania nursed over thirty infants on the street after their orphanage collapsed into dust in a matter of minutes and left them all homeless. Nearby, the police shot rounds of warning gunfire in an attempt to control young men looting local shops, while U.N. peacekeepers struggled to keep any sense of order while passing out food to the starving and outraged Haitians, mistakenly interpreting the date packaged as the date of expiry.

On Tuesday, Jan 12 at 4:15p.m. local time, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, 16 miles away from the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. The earthquake, along with a series of at least 33 aftershocks, including a 6.1 magnitude aftershock on Jan 20, took an estimated 200,000 Haitian lives, and affected another 1.5 million.

Though the hope for finding survivors like Ena Zizi dwindle as each hour passes, world relief efforts continue to pour in to support the recovery and feed the displaced locals of the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.

The International Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the United Nations, and Haitian president René Préval pleaded for donations. But in a Straits Times article just days after the earthquake, a chart showed the US having donated $100 million dollars, other smaller nations such as Australia and Japan having donated around $5 million each, with Singapore having donated a mere $50,000 at that time. The SAS High School Service Council then began efforts to match that amount.

“The Service Council and the administrators from each division talked about how we were going to go about raising this money, and we set a target goal of $50,000,” said Victor Tan, the Service Council president. “We’re relying mostly on donations, but the middle school’s holding a bake sale, and other divisions are doing other things.”

The council however, was criticized by students about not knowing which charity to donate to. Further criticism about the slow response questioned whether it would be more effective to donate immediately online.

“We haven’t decided on a charity yet, but our main goal was just to get the money as soon as we can,” Tan said. School wide, our goal was to raise $50,000. If people want to make an impact in some other way, then that’s great. But for those that don’t know how, or are just too lazy to, this is what we’re here for.”

Some think that the target goal should be greater.

“If you’ve got people who have the kind of money that we have, $50,000 should be almost raised in a day,” English teacher and Global Giving sponsor Mark Guggisberg said. “And I know that people think that oh, we’ve been hit by a tsunami once, the SARS epidemic once, but so what? We’re a privileged group of people, and I think that charity is something that everyone here talks about, but not a lot do a lot about.”

But that might be attributed to the fact that students don’t know what’s going on. Walking down the middle school after school on the Friday after the start of the fundraiser, two eighth grade girls were enthusiastically selling cookies for the relief fund. But when asked about how much they knew about what happened in Haiti, neither of them seemed to know more than the fact that there was an earthquake. One girl guessed the death toll to be at three million, while the other nodded in agreement.

“I think students are very ill informed about what happened,” Guggisberg said. “But I think generally, the population of the planet is ill informed. We have cruise ships that are literally going by on their way to Jamaica or the Bahamas, and they’re going so close that they could be giving aid and food and transportation, and instead they’re on their way to their beach holidays. It’s insensitive to say the least. It’s an ethical issue.”

Although the Service Council managed to raise $96,000 to send to Haiti, with looting and rioting, a severe lack of medical aid, and inefficient transportation of food and water to problem areas nationwide, all in the absence of any sort of governmental control, the problems facing the Haitians continue to increase.

“We should read into what happened in Haiti, and what’s making it so hard for aid to be brought in,” senior Aditi Abrol said. “Besides it being an issue we should all empathize with, if we don’t learn about it now, how will we better handle it if it happens in the future?”

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