America's North Shore Journal

Coast Guard Petty Offi­cer 1^st Class Erin Hunter, health ser­vices tech­ni­cian from Miami, and Petty Offi­cer 1^st Class Kate Roberts, health ser­vices tech­ni­cian aboard the Coast Guard Cut­ter Oak, treat a woman's wounded hand at the Kil­lick, Haiti, coast guard base, Jan. 28. The Hait­ian coast guard base has become home for mem­bers of the Hait­ian coast guard and their fam­i­lies after the 7.0 mag­ni­tude earth­quake killed thou­sands and left mil­lions home­less, dev­as­tated the Port-au-Prince area of Haiti, Jan. 12. (U.S. Coast Guard photo/Petty Offi­cer 1^st Class David Mosley)

Valentine's Day 2010 brings lit­tle to the hun­dreds of thou­sands of Haitians still in need due to the earth­quake last month. The NGO's are squab­bling among them­selves and the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment is next to use­less. Fundrais­ing, at the mil­lion dol­lar level, is all but dead though kind­hearted Amer­i­cans and oth­ers world­wide con­tinue small efforts to raise funds for Hait­ian relief.

I have been track­ing the giv­ing by indi­vid­ual Amer­i­cans, Amer­i­can com­pa­nies and Amer­i­can foun­da­tions. I have been using the same meth­ods I used to track the same infor­ma­tion for the SE Asian tsunami and for Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina relief. The research is not exact, and does not claim to record every cash or in-kind dona­tion. What I am doing is doc­u­ment­ing the gen­eros­ity of the Amer­i­can pub­lic, per­haps the most giv­ing nation on the planet.

The data behind these num­bers can be found in a PDF file here. $347,423,603.00 rep­re­sents the total of cash and goods and ser­vices donated by Amer­i­cans for Hait­ian earth­quake relief.

All of the over 170 Roman Catholic dio­ce­ses in the United States have held spe­cial col­lec­tions for Hait­ian relief. I have only been able to locate the data for 26 of them. Roman Catholic dona­tions for Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina relief totaled over $25 mil­lion by the time I dis­con­tin­ued record keeping.