To the Editor of The Daily Campus:
Earlier this year, near the start of the spring semester, a massive earthquake struck the Caribbean island nation of Haiti. Collection boxes sprung up around the SMU campus for SMU’s Heart Beats for Haiti. As students prepared to flood campus in anticipation of the fall 2010 semester, flooding ravaged the Central Asian nation of Pakistan. The floods left 1,500 dead and up to 20 million people homeless. Among those now living in camps for IDPs, or Internally Displaced Persons, there are over 100,000 children at risk of death by starvation and a total of eight million people at risk due to diseases and food shortages. With at least 894,000 homes damaged or washed away and over 20 million people affected, the United Nations has declared the flooding in Pakistan and the resulting aftermath the largest natural disaster in modern history. Does SMU’s heart not beat for Pakistan too?
According to the United States Department of State and the United States Agency for International Development there are several ways to help. You can text the word “SWAT” to 50555 to make a $10 donation to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. You can text “FLOOD” to 27722 to give $10 to the U.S. State Department’s Pakistan Flood Relief Fund. Additional ways can be found at http://www.usaid.gov/ pakistanflooding/ and http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/interaction-members-respond- floods-pakistan. Two excellent organizations I personally recommend are Mercy Corps, http://www.mercycorps.org/peteo039farrell/blog/21979, and Episcopal Relief and Development, http://www.er-d.org/PakistanReliefAugust2010.
Yes, Haiti is still struggling and still needs our help, but Pakistan needs our help too.
Let our hearts beat for Haiti and Pakistan.
Jan Anderson
SMU 2012