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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Aid for Japan
Has anyone made a donation to Japan yet? We need to do that still.
TH said he heard something about Japanese rules that make it harder to accept international aid - that supplies have to be produce in Japan, that can't be shipped in. However sometimes I think he 'hears' things like this and maybe only hears a portion of the whole story. I was just wondering if any of you have heard things like this.
I need to sit down and do some research soon. There is an international aid group through my church. I will have to look into seeing what they are doing.
Re: Aid for Japan
as for the shipping issue: It's better not to ship things in disaster situations, it can be costly and take forever to get there. Much better to send money and buy supplies needed in country.
I personally think it's a false dichotomy to say we have to either send $ overseas OR work on our own problems in the U.S. Both are important.
Here is a link to what my organization is doing:
http://www.crwrc.org/news.cfm?newsid=2535§ion=23
we are still determining what long-term partners we'll be working with.
Last updated 4/06/11
No, we wouldn't ship it ourselves! He thought he had heard that they wouldn't accept shipments from relief organizations of certain types of supplies unless it was made in Japan. Which led us to the discussion, if there is mass destruction, how can they produce items. We are guessing there is more to the story. Maybe it is for medical supplies for quality control.
Our church organization has already started working on shipments & getting people over there to do disaster relief, so I don't think what he heard was completely accurate. I think in situations like this it IS very important for things to go through the organizations that already have disaster relief channels in place. The Red Cross is the most well known, but we donate through Brethren Disaster Ministries, which is connected with Church World Service (they're the ones who sponsor the CROP Walk every year). There are definitely protocols for what can go, how it has to be transported, etc. and the people who do it for a living are the ones who know how to get it there in a fashion it can actually be used.
I ran across this the other day and it is an interesting article about how a well intentioned offer can actually harm, if not handled in the right way.
http://www.drmomma.org/2011/03/human-milk-4-human-babies-after-japan.html