The team at Travel-Junkie has strong ties to the area with the recent cata­strophies, espe­cially Indone­sia. I lived there for almost 2 years and trav­elled all over it and it sad­dens me that once again a dis­aster has struck, almost sim­ul­tani­ously in vari­ous coun­tries. Because of this we ask every­body, who has a little extra to spare to donate.

Dona­tions do have their mis­giv­ings. We under­stand that. Dur­ing the 2004 Tsunami I lived in Indone­sia and have talked to many people who were there and gave their help. A big prob­lem then was that some money didn’t even get to the dis­aster zones and that some NGOs had so much money, they didn’t know how to spend it and so spent it on any­thing they could think of, even though it didn’t bene­fit the com­munit­ies in need at all.

Still, short of jump­ing onto a plane with a case­load of cash, donat­ing some­thing is still bet­ter than doing noth­ing. Just ima­gine what would have happened after the Tsunami if nobody would have given anything.

And please don’t can­cel your vaca­tion, if you are already booked on a flight to Indone­sia, the Phil­ip­pines or Samoa. You can always change your flight to another loc­a­tion within the coun­try if you were gonna go to what are now the dis­aster zones. After the Tsunami in 2004, many people did just that with dev­ast­at­ing res­ults for the tour­ist indus­tries in places like Bali, even though the island is far far away from Bandah Aceh. A while ago I wrote an art­icle about just this topic. Check it out!

Below are some links to a couple well known organ­iz­a­tions, so if you have a few Euros, Dol­lars or Rupee, then give a little! Thank you.

Medi­cins Sans Fron­ti­eres
UNICEF