oulangi has posted this page of useful advice about making charitable contributions. Of particular interest is the section giving links to organizations with databases you can use to research charities before you donate. These sources provide such information as how effective various charities are in utilizing donations, whether or not they are eligible to receive tax-deductible donations, etc. Another useful link: MoveOn's HurricaneHousing project, which allows you to offer free shelter to displaced victims of the storm, and provides a search feature for the use of refugees seeking that shelter. So far, over 81,000 beds have been offered.
And then there's this post containing a list of some of the organizations and businesses that will match your donations made through their web sites or, in some cases, in their stores. (Peet's Coffee, yo!)
Sad: LJ voices which once came from a now vanished town. This made me think of the part of Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" in which he tells a tale (probably tall) revolving around some fellows who intend to dig up a treasure they have learned was buried in a particular place in the town of Napoleon, at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Arkansas Rivers. Then, arriving at the towns location, they discover that it has long since been washed down the Mississippi by a flood of the Arkansas River. Twain writes:
"Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling
between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I
used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago.
Town that was county-seat of a great and important county; town with
a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights--
an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl,
and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley;
town where we were handed the first printed news of the 'Pennsylvania's'
mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago; a town no more--
swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a
fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney!"
Happy news:
scyllacat, whose last post from New Orleans on August 29th was so ominous, has fetched up in Atlanta and is posting again.As for this dull place, the night has become almost cold, and the hours have passed in utter tranquility, but for one brief visit by an undetermined number of deer who I inadvertently startled by opening the front door too quickly. I heard their hooves clopping as they ran unseen up the street in the moonless darkness.