Alex walked in after school today, Mom?  Can I send a text to donate money to Haiti?  It adds ten bucks to the phone bill, and the phone company donates all the money. 

Of course you can, I said.  Please do.  And thank you.

“U.S. cell phone users have contributed more than $5 million in $10
increments to the Red Cross for Haiti disaster relief, by far the
largest outpouring of support via mobile devices in history.”

Rather than send a text, I chose Direct Relief.  They are a stand-up company.

I’ve been following the harrowing news reports on NPR.org, but it’s so very difficult to read, and I have such a hard time looking at the photos.  All those bodies, and the tiny ones among them hurting to look at even more.  I read about an eight year old girl in a makeshift hospital.  Her whole family is gone.  Eleven people.  And I look at my own eight year old girl across the dinner table tonight as she tells us, over her bowl of homemade chicken soup, what she wants to do for the science fair.  None of her ideas are experiments, really.  They’re inventions.  But her eyes are so bright and she’s gesturing with her spoon as she talks about hooking up a camera to a remote-controlled car or seeing who in the school is the strongest by building some kind of lifting machine that she can keep adding weight to.  She will invite everyone via the school intercom system to test it out when classes are over with one afternoon next week, even the fifth graders.  And suddenly I am crying for how broken this other girl must feel.  This other little girl just like mine, this utterly orphaned girl, who maybe a couple of nights ago was making her family laugh at the supper table as she talked about what she wanted to do.