By Lilia Hargis
A week has passed since the magnitude-7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti, and its impacts are still fresh in the minds of the Northwestern students who met Monday night to coordinate a campus-wide response to the tragedy.
Student group leaders made tentative plans for a week of events on campus beginning Thursday Jan. 21 to both raise money for relief and educate students about the politics, history and culture of Haiti. It remains undecided which relief organizations will benefit from the fundraising, but the Red Cross and Partners In Health were two popular choices.
Almost 20 students, representing more than 10 campus groups, attended the meeting and will be spending the next few days planning the events. Weinberg freshman David Chase, an ASG senator, and Weinberg senior Peter Luckow, who works with GlobeMed, organized and led the meeting.
Helen Wood from the Center for Student Involvement spoke about ways NU worked to raise $10,000 in six weeks for Hurricane Katrina relief in 2005.
Last week, Luckow coordinated NU students in pressuring administrators to respond to the devastation. Numerous students sent e-mails to University President Morton O. Schapiro requesting a response, Luckow said. On Friday, Schapiro posted a message on NU’s Web site regarding the earthquake.
“On behalf of Northwestern University, I offer our support and sympathy to everyone affected by the recent disaster in Haiti, both the people there and their many friends and relatives in the Chicago area,” Schapiro said in the message, which also contained links and information about organizations accepting donations for the relief effort.
The Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NU responded to the earthquake Thursday by compiling a list of organizations providing emergency relief and long-term development aid to Haiti. A link to this list can be found in Schapiro’s message on the NU home page.
Haiti needs money and resources most right now, and the purpose of the list is to cut out the intermediate step for potential donors of finding a place to give, said Brodwyn Fischer, director of the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
“(The earthquake) is one more disaster on the back of a country that has every imaginable disaster in its recent history,” Fischer said. “And it is taking place in a context where there are no resources to deal with it.”
The Red Cross Club was also among the first groups on campus to raise awareness about the earthquake when its members sent e-mails to student listservs Wednesday afternoon describing the situation and instructing students how to make donations by texting “Haiti” to 90999.
It is important that people continue to be conscious of the issue in the long term, said Deanna Mei, the group’s co-president.
“There is a lot of hype right now, but people who care about this need to keep attention on the issue to sustain help beyond the first two weeks,” the Weinberg junior said.
No comments:
Post a Comment