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Hey all. Just so you know this will now be the only place for these blog posts.

As we transition Change You Can Afford into a charity, that site will be dedicated to the charity and no longer host the blogging archives.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

V-Day supports Pakistan

I just logged in to check my old school email address, I don't get much email to that address anymore. However, there was an email from the V-Day organization talking about their involvement in Pakistan and asking for donations. V-Day is an organization dedicated to ending violence and abuse against women worldwide. They are most well known for their grassroots performances of The Vagina Monologues, which are always performed for local charities and global issues that affect women's safety. I have helped organize and been in the play multiple times and I found it very empowering, and loved my experiences and the friends I made from the performances. I appreciate the global outlook of their spotlight every year, from Katrina victims to the widespread violence women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo face they try to raise awareness of the problems women face globally and I think that is very important.

Angelina Jolie on the Pakistan flooding.

I was reading more about the Pakistan flooding and it just moved me so much. Its difficult to convey the true scope of the catastrophe or the urgent needs of the people affected. So I am going to let Angelina Jolie express her thoughts on it and hope they touch as they did me.



And here's another one, where she hopes people will start giving and helping and not give in to donor fatigue.  While not all of us can afford to give the $100,000 that she has, we can afford to give something. The numbers for Pakistan are very low considering the scope of the tragedy. "While 3 million people were affected in Haiti the number affected in Pakistan is 7 times as much and climbing. As the flood waters recede, human misery is escalating."I will be donating to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as Angelina Jolie suggests, because they are working with the people directly affected and they are already there on the ground.



Please join me in helping those affected Pakistan flood, and if you know of any good organizations doing good work their, please do no hesitate to recommend them. Thanks and enjoy your weekend.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Pakistani Flood Relief

Yesterday, I was reading one of my favorite blogs Racailicious - which focuses on the intersection of race and pop culture. I always find it informative and helps me to look at issues from a different context. If you haven't read it, its a great blog to talk about how race interacts with our culture, I highly recommend it. From there I was directed to some information about the Pakistani Flood Relief effort and was underwhelmed by the US response. First I want to really reinforce the scope of the flooding; here is a link to a map (from the BBC) with a visual overlay of the flooding on top of the US, so you can see the size of the affected area. I think it helps to have that kind of a visual to really understand the extent of the disaster.

Racialicious had a link to an article from the Atlantic - 4 Reason Why American's Aren't Giving for Pakistani Flood Relief by Max Fisher. This article is discussing the dismal response for this natural emergency, in comparison to other's such as the Haiti earthquake. "The figures for the Haiti earthquake, tsunami, and Kashmir earthquake were $1087.33, $1249.80, and $388.33 respectively. For the Pakistan floods, the world has given only $16.36 per victim. These shortfalls have led many to ask a macabre question. Why did the world, particularly U.S. individual donors, give so much for Haiti but show so little concern for Pakistan?" Here's an article in WIRED discussing the difference in response from the US compared to the Haiti earthquake, and the differences are startling." According to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, a month after the flooding started, the United States has provided an aggregated $200 million for Pakistan. That’s less than half of what it gave Haiti’s much, much smaller population."