YOUR AD HERE »

Letter: Donate quickly to Nepal

Donate quickly to Nepal

Many people in the Roaring Fork Valley have been to Nepal and experienced the hospitality of the Nepali people. Now is the time to give back.

The country is reeling after Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake. Thousands are known to be dead in the Kathmandu Valley, and the death toll in the villages is likely to be much higher. Hundreds of thousands are sleeping in open spaces, afraid to go back into their homes. In the coming days, there will be urgent rescue efforts, water and food shortages, overwhelmed medical facilities and probably disease.



There are a number of international organizations delivering emergency aid to Nepal. Please make a donation today.

These organizations will not wait for your donation to do their work, but to some extent they will scale their operations in Nepal according to how much support they receive in the early days. An outpouring of donations for Nepal right now will give them the confidence to devote major resources.




I urge everyone to give what they can to the large, reputable aid organizations that specialize in this type of emergency. Two that I can recommend are the International Red Cross and CARE.

Small, freelance aid missions are neither helpful nor efficient in the early days of a humanitarian crisis. If you have ideas of getting on a plane and taking a backpack full of medical supplies to Nepal, please instead consider donating the money to an organization that already has people on the ground and knows what’s needed.

Dave Reed

Carbondale and Grand Junction