To donate or not to donate

The only word on the street lately seems to be Haiti. Everyday there seems to be some new organization popping up to provide aid to this disaster-stricken country. Americans are banding together to try to help in this time of need and if you are one of the people considering jumping onto the bandwagon as well, you may want to consider a few things.

First off, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast from Central Florida to Texas in August 2005 and the rebuilding since the disaster is still not straightened out.

There are parts of those states that need to be rebuilt, cleaned up or, at the very least leveled. The victims of Hurricane Katrina lost everything: their homes, their jobs, all of their personal belongings, and some of them even lost family and friends. There are still victims from this disaster that are waiting for money that they were promised to help get their lives back in order and many of them are still homeless.

Secondly, if you do want to donate, make sure you choose a legitimate organization. Disasters tend to bring out the scammers and con-artists and if you don't do your research, you could end up donating money that will never reach Haiti.

These scams can be in the form of an e-mail claiming to be a well-known organization, like the Red Cross and turn out to be Average Joe taking advantage of the generosity of others whom are only trying to help give some relief to the victims in Haiti.

Finally, make sure that you are donating money. Some organizations have started to collect items to ship over to Haiti such as clothing, food, toys and medication. This will only complicate the process even more and create an extra job for the people trying to help the Haitians.

The same thing happened following the tsunami that hit Indonesia in December 2004.

In an attempt to help, people sent a mishmosh of items from clothes and food, to birth control, bibles and toys and even opened medications, as if they had just emptied their medicine cabinet to support the cause.

The amount of packages was overwhelming and since most of them were not organized in any fashion, most of the items were not able to be used. The medications were incinerated.

There is no doubt that the disaster that struck Haiti is a serious issue that needs to be taken care of however, what is even more serious is that we will jump at the chance to help another country when there are still people in our very own country that need our help.

We need to stop spending so much time, resources and money on others, when we have our own significant problems at home.