Excerpt from:
BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Asian disaster: How to help
Global aid organisations have launched urgent appeals for donations to help survivors of Sunday’s Indian Ocean earthquake disaster.

More than 120,000 people are confirmed killed by the waves and millions more are homeless.

Many governments and organisations – including the US, Canada, Australia, the EU and the UN – are sending aid.

The UN has warned that supplies are urgently needed to support the survivors and to try and prevent disease which, it says, could double the death toll.

The Disasters Emergency Committee – www.dec.org….uk – is an umbrella group of UK aid organisations – including Action Aid, British Red Cross and Oxfam – working to provide clean water, food and shelter to thousands. To call from the UK, dial 0870 60 60 900.

The United Nations World Food Programme – www.wfp.org… – is seeking donations to feed victims of the earthquake.

Medecins Sans Frontieres – www.msf.org… – is sending aid workers to the region, focusing on medical care for survivors and displaced people after the rescue operations.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef – www.unicef.org….uk – is working to meet the “urgent needs of hundreds of thousands of people” affected by the tsunami disaster.

Read the rest at the link at the top of this post…

Google Search: tsunami

Excerpt from:
Overhead Costs of International Relief Organizations
Below, I’ve highlighted in blue those organizations with less than a 10% overhead rate, and in orange those organizations above the 10% mark, but that may still be worthy of your consideration. For instance, the Doctors Without Borders organization has a high overhead rate, but presumably this is because it’s more expensive to have doctors on staff than other kinds of disaster relief workers. Still, their website does not have as much transparency as one would like, in terms of how and where they spend their money. Also, Oxfam also has a high overhead rate — again, making me curious why this is so. Some, like Save the Children were a surprising find (not one of the ‘usual suspects’ that people had emailed me about). Apparently, they had the “largest international organization presence” in the Aceh Province when the tsunami hit (see their web site below). Also, note that AmeriCares has one of the lowest overhead rate, at 1.5%.

Excerpt from:
The Command Post – Global Recon – Operation Give: “Fill the Plane” Campaign
Operation Give, a charitable organization that sends toys and other goods to the children of Iraq and Afghanistan, have found a way to collect supplies for the relief effort and get them over there quickly, thanks to the generosity of FedEx.

Rev. Donald Sensing best described the operation at his weblog, so I took the liberty of excerpting what he wrote to best explain what OpGive is doing.

Chief Wiggles (aka Army Chief Warrant Officer Paul Horton), who founded Operation Give while serving in Iraq, just announced he has arranged for free FedEx relief flights to aid tsunami victims. Paul explains all here.
[Read more…]

This is pretty f*cked-up. So it surprises me that there weren’t any Americans mentioned, such tourists generally being pretty arrogant in foreign countries.

Insensitivity to the worst disaster in history takes on a new meaning as European visitors to Phuket complain about their surroundings…
…excerpt from: www.dcthornton.com…