Sherry Chandler

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Donate through UNICEF.

You can also give at Oxfam.

It is my understanding that these NGOs are on the ground in Myanmar. U.S. aid, being delivered by the military, is not being allowed in. [Update: That's probably just that it's attached to another government, let alone the military.]

More information at the Myanmar Relief blog.

I’ve received several emails and comments over the past few days asking how NGOs can get into Myanmar to assist, given the difficulty in obtaining entry visas. While I don’t have a direct answer, my experience with Hurricane Andrew in the U.S. is probably somewhat instructive. In order to get into S. Florida with relief supplies, I had to work through an established agency already in the area (Catholic Relief Services) and bring documentation that the relief supplies I was transporting were destined for that organization. It was the only way I could be assured of getting through the roadblocks and demonstrate to local authorities that the truck I was driving was legit. And this was in the U.S. I’m sure that those who responded to Katrina could tell similar stories.

There’s no question that this approach (working through an established agency) should ease the difficulty of access to Myanmar, because much of the disaster response staging by NGOs appears to be occurring in Bangkok, Thailand where most NGOs in the region are based. While the government of Myanmar was initially very reluctant to issue visas to relief organizations, there are several agencies that have longer term relationships in Myanmar for ongoing work, and contact with any of those organizations would certainly expedite acceptance of offers of assistance (either monetary donations or actual on-the-ground efforts).

Doctors Without Borders seems to be there, too.

And CARE, Lutheran World Relief, etc.

Because JimT has drawn my attention to the NewsHours poetry series (see comments), I discovered this Mother’s Day feature they did with poet Francis Richey. Richey has written The Warrior (Penguin Group, 2008), a series of 28 poems to her son, a Green Beret who has served two tours in Iraq.

She wrote the poems because she opposed the war in which her son was fighting, because she couldn’t understand what her son was becoming, and because she didn’t want to lose him:

I didn’t realize that these poems would be a bridge back to Ben. I just felt like they were helping me to live with the reality that there was distance between us and that I might never be able to bridge it.

But they gave me a way to explore and try to understand, try to understand things from his point of view.

It was scary to write these poems. I was afraid. When I wrote “Kill School,” I was afraid of what was going to show up on the page, because you can’t control it. You have to just let yourself write. And then to show him that poem was a little scary, too.

As a mother of sons, I found this segment shattering.

Go and read the sample poems.

Watch the video.

It puts things in perspective.

Transcript here. Video here.

Frances Richey’s web site and her blog.

from Marie Cocco (h/t The Confluence), A Farewell to the ‘Hillary Nutcracker’ and Other Obscenities (emphasis mine):

WASHINGTON—As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it’s time to take stock of what I will not miss.

I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan “Bros before Hos.” The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho), and they are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won’t miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item.

I won’t miss episodes like the one in which the liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a “big f—in’ whore” and said the same about former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. Rhodes was appearing at an event sponsored by a San Francisco radio station, before an audience of appreciative Obama supporters—one of whom had promoted the evening on the presumptive Democratic nominee’s official campaign Web site.

I won’t miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.

…

When all other images fail, there is one other I will not miss. That is, the down-to-the-basics, simplest one: “White women are a problem, that’s—you know, we all live with that” (William Kristol of Fox News).

I won’t miss reading another treatise by a man or woman, of the left or right, who says that sexism has had not even a teeny-weeny bit of influence on the course of the Democratic campaign. To hint that sexism might possibly have had a minimal role is to play that risible “gender card.”

Most of all, I will not miss the silence.

I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven’t uttered a word of public outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.

Would the silence prevail if Obama’s likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they’d compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama’s sex organs play?

There are many reasons why Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for “change.” But for all Clinton’s political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.

And a corollary to the corollary, Froma Harrop says Obamites Pile on Clinton at Own Peril (h/t Avedon):

Many in the Obama camp, having outfoxed the apparently not-so-formidable Clinton machine, can’t seem to get the hang of winning gracefully. They feel a need to drive a stake in Hillary Clinton’s reputation, then dance. If they were smart, they’d heap praise on Clinton and let her finish out the race, however she chooses to do so.

That’s sage advice, even though offered by Republican mastermind-turned-pundit Karl Rove. Treat Clinton shabbily, he says, and many of her supporters “will remember it by November.”

Nonetheless, Obamites are throwing victory parties over the impending defeat of a fellow Democrat who has thus far pulled in over 47 percent of their party’s primary and caucus participants. Some take a more direct approach. In anticipation of the West Virginia primary, college students for Obama were hurling insults at farmers and truck drivers holding signs for Clinton.

…

Disrespecting the nearly 17 million who have supported Clinton is politically unwise, but turning them into “the enemy” is insane. Last week’s enemy was working-class white people. The Democrats can win without a majority of white voters — as Obama strategists undiplomatically note — but they can’t win without a strong showing among them.

So Obama partisans do not help their cause by willfully misrepresenting Clinton’s reference to “hard-working Americans, white Americans” as racist rather than as a poorly worded observation made in a state of utter exhaustion.

The fervor of their outrage suggests that some regard the mere consideration of white people, particularly white men, as a demographic needing a special message is an act of bigotry. (That’s as opposed to a thousand other racial and socio-economic groups that politicos routinely slice and dice.)

And this one, also via Avedon, because everybody seems to think Appalachian = racist:

Union coal miners in southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania fostered multiracial solidarity through both their adoption of the nickname “redneck” and their wearing of red bandanas. This image of unified, class-conscious redneck miners contrasts markedly with the traditional image of the politically unorganized, race-conscious redneck farmers. … But unlike these red-necked farmers and sharecroppers, who consciously attempted to distinguish themselves in dress from African Americans during Reconstruction, union miners embraced redneck as a way to undercut, rather than to heighten, racial distinctions during the coalfield wars of the 1910s and 1920s. For striking miners, then, the red handkerchiefs functioned as a display of multiracial union solidarity against the coal-mining operators, hired gun thugs, and National Guard troops, thereby shifting the focus from each striker’s race or ethnicity to the unifying symbol of the bandana and their collective interests as workingmen. Of course, the class solidarity symbolized by the red bandanas was grounded in miners’ shared experiences as an occupational group and as union members. And there was a certain occupational logic to this symbolic obliteration of the polarizing issues of race and ethnicity, since all miners emerged from underground with blackened, grimy faces, arms, and hands smeared with coal dust, which obscured their race and made them all of one color.