Tsunami gifts leave beaten path

BOSTON: Tsunami charity isn’t just pouring in as cash, food, and medicine. Creative donors have sent everything from stock certificates to gel that tampers the reek of decomposing corpses. Many corporate and private donors, assessing how they can help advance the relief efforts, are asking themselves: What do we know how to do? What do we have tucked away on a shelf ? For United Airlines, that meant offering 11 million kilometres of travel to disaster-bound relief workers and letting passengers donate more than 129 million kilometres from their frequent-flier plans so far. It is also contributing airplane cargo space to haul relief supplies.

“What we do best is transporting people and things to their destination,” said company spokeswoman Robin Urbanski. “So we feel that’s the best way we could help.” Other airlines are also encouraging their passengers to contribute miles. In one of the biggest charitable outpourings ever for a natural disaster, cash has surged in too. The leading private relief agencies alone have collected more than $406 million in money or pledges, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy newspaper. Many prefer or only accept cash, because it can buy whatever is needed at a given moment, near the disaster. Even so, some agencies have also accepted stocks and bonds. Save the Children has received about 20 such donations since the tsunamis pounded countries from Indonesia to eastern Africa on December 26, according to one of its corporate fund-raisers, Lori Redmer. In an entire year, that agency would usually take in maybe a third of that.

Charitable agencies must sell the stock to convert it to cash and supplies. Discount broker Muriel Siebert & Co, based in New York, helps tsunami victims by selling stock donated to the American Red Cross and forgoing the usual commissions. Founder Muriel Siebert said donors can both avoid capital gains taxes and write off the contribution. “They love it,” she said. The Red Cross has collected at least 117 stock gifts worth about $570,000, according to spokeswoman Kara Bunte. One gift alone was worth about $90,000. The donated stocks included blue chips such as Johnson & Johnson, ExxonMobil and American Express. Others are contributing goods meant for the devastated villages, but beyond the usual emergency necessities.

Patus, a start-up company with offices in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and Chicago, has given about 10,000 foil packets of a nasal gel designed to attenuate the stench of faeces, urine and rotting human corpses. The clear gel is dabbed around the nostrils and imparts a soothing vanilla aroma, according to Patus CEO Guy Hirsch. Each packet lasts about two hours. Hirsch said it has been tested by Israeli personnel who respond to terrorist attacks. In Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, it has been used by tsunami disaster workers and some Israelis searching for lost relatives, Hirsch said. More than 162,000 people died across 11 countries. Mattel, based in El Segundo, California, has donated 100,000 of its toys. It expects them to be packaged with emergency necessities in kits and handed out to children at temporary disaster shelters, according to company spokeswoman Jules Andres.

Some tsunami donors are peering into corners of their homes, utility rooms and garages for just about anything that can be sold through an unusual channel. So far, they have donated more than $50,000 worth of such stereos, cameras, laptops, DVD players, at least one wristwatch, and other goods — both new and used — through AuctionDrop. That company normally runs auctions for sellers on the eBay Web site for a percentage of their take. However, when these donations are made, the company is paying for shipments, giving up its share of the sale, and passing the money on to Care International. “We can generate a lot more money this way than we have cash to give,” said AuctionDrop CEO Randy Adams.

Meanwhile, the United Nation’s food arm says Asia’s tsunami is likely to have worsened malnutrition around the Indian Ocean’s rim, but a massive drive to feed hundreds of thousands of survivors may end up reducing it. The World Food Programme is feeding around 1.2 million tsunami-affected people from Sumatra to Somalia, with the bulk of recipients in Sri Lanka. Executive Director James Morris is confident food aid is reaching most people in need. “I suspect (malnutrition is) marginally higher, but also there will be a more intense effort to see that every child is fed, so it may affect it positively — there may be some silver lining here,” Morris told Reuters in an interview yesterday. “It’s a very small silver lining. The problem is enormous, but we’re very focused on seeing that everyone at risk here has a calorie diet of 2,100 calories per day, and that may be a little more than some ... have had traditionally in their diet.”

The UN agency is feeding around 750,000 people in Sri Lanka, many of whom lost everything when giant waves battered the island’s southern, eastern and northern seaboard on December 26, killing around 31,000 people. Hundreds of thousands are depending on food handouts and children are among the most vulnerable. “The percentage of malnutrition among children here is very high — 35 percent in the general population — and in places where the poverty is greater, malnutrition among children goes up, so it’s a considerable problem,” Morris said. The World Food Programme’s (WFP) food basket includes rice, wheat flour, pulses, beans, legumes and vegetable oil. The agency also hands out high-protein biscuits and a high-energy blend of corn and soya. Morris is considering adding canned fish to the list, as many Sri Lankans are wary of eating fresh fish, a staple part of their diet, for fear they have scavenged on the remains of tsunami victims. “There are no examples so far of serious, large numbers of people being affected by health problems,” Morris said.

The World Food Programme was already feeding around 1 million Sri Lankans before the tsunami struck under other projects, so it had stocks in place and other food was made available on ships diverted by the United States and Japan. Morris toured the historic southern city of Galle on Saturday, which was all but flattened by the tsunami save for a 17th century Dutch fort, and said he was surprised and encouraged at the pace of the clean-up operation. The WFP is feeding between 300,000 to 400,000 people hit by the tsunami in Indonesia, between 25,000-50,000 people in the remote Maldives island chain off the toe of India, around 15,000 people in Myanmar and 20,000 people in Somalia. The tsunami killed more than 163,000 people, the vast majority of them in Indonesia. Thousands more are missing.