Philippines Disaster Relief Project

     Since it has been plaguing the news, most people are aware of the current situation in the Philippines. After a tragically big typhoon hit the country, there is no now clean drinking water, no shelter, and no medical help whatsoever. To combat the terrible things happening in the Philippines, most people have turned to donating whatever money they have to a charity that will use the proceeds to assist the country in need. However, there are new studies that show charities nowadays are taking the donated money and using, for example, 70 cents out of one dollar to foot the overhead costs of the charity. Although some people believe that this is not a big deal, others believe that it would be more profitable to send money straight to the effected area.

In my opinion, donating money to The Red Cross would be the best option because that charity has been around for so long and is very trustworthy and reliable. They use 91 cents from every dollar donated go straight to help the cause. Although The Red Cross uses money donated for overhead costs, the overhead costs are are used for necessary things such as: transportation, shipping, employee salaries, etc. So even though most of your money is going to assist The Red Cross, you are also helping the people in the Philippines. The American Red Cross is a great charity to help with the Philippines because not only can they help with food, water, and shelter, but they can also help medically because they are the number one place for blood donations.

Another widely acclaimed charity is UNICEF. With over 5 million children effected by the typhoon, their main focus is to assist and protect them. These children desperately need shelter, clean water, medicine and nutrition. Although 60 metric tons of emergency supplies just arrived in the Philippines, it isn't enough. UNICEF's resources in the Philippines are exhausted. Coming straight from the UNICEF website: "The U.S. Fund for UNICEF spends 90.4 cents of every dollar we receive on programs that help children. Only 6.7 cents goes to fundraising, and 2.9 cents to administration." They are very experienced in giving the most help to children and how to keep them safe which I think is a number one priority after any disaster.

To get clean water to the Philippines is a hard task because it is such a long way to transport water that by the time it got there, it would have to be tested again. The smartest, and cheapest way to get clean water straight to the people is to bring water from immediate areas and filter it on the spot. There are many inventions to do this task such as: drops to put in the water to clean it, pumps to filter the water, or even straws that filter the water as you drink it. Obviously the best thing to do would be to find the cheapest invention, ship massive amounts of it to the Philippines, and have volunteers help filter and clean the water before handing it out. This way there are low costs which leaves more money to be spent on medical supplies, food, and shelter for the survivors of the typhoon.

There is no simple way to bring peace and health to the Philippines but we are trying our best. Through charitable donations and volunteers, we can start to rebuild the Philippines through clean water, food, and shelter. It won't happen overnight but with hard work, we can get it back to the way it used to be before this horrible disaster.