Living and Dying in Haiti

A friend of one of my Facebook friends (and colleagues) just posted this story about a young woman from Port Orchard, WA, Molly Hightower, whose body was found in the rubble after the earthquake. She was a 22-year-old aid worker--she went to high school in Tacoma and then studied at the University of Portland before going to live in Haiti for a year to work with disabled children.

She wrote a beautiful blog about her time in Haiti. She planned to get a graduate degree in special ed or counseling. After having visited Seattle before Christmas, she was commenting about how little time she had left in Haiti before returning to the real world.

What a loss to her family and society! She truly seemed to love her work with these orphaned and abandoned children in Haiti. Her blog is a wonderful gift of memories to her family.

She is just one of the thousands of losses from this tragedy in Haiti. It feels like the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina all over again. But with the isolation and limited resources of Haiti, will the country ever be able to recover from this catastrophe? It's hard not to feel helpless.

Mike and I plan to make a donation, but to which organization? So many are deserving. I saw a brief news article about credit card companies profiting from people's generous donations, and it irked me to no end. But this morning Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover companies announced that they will waive their fees for donations to Haiti relief. That makes me feel so much better about making a donation! Now to decide where. Red Cross, UNICEF, Mercy Corps, OXFAM, CARE?

And with all this human misery permeating through the world, who in the hell gives a rat's ass about Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, as this writer so aptly puts it?