After the Sichuan earthquake, overseas Chinese helped organize donations to China Red Cross. Tshinghua Challenge Education Foundation, Mitbbs, Peking University Alumni Association and Shanghai Jiao Tong University Alumni Association of Silicon Valley have announced online donation. Paypal and Google have waived the transaction fee for immediate donations for earthquake relief. Americans started to pay attention and have tried their best to help their ‘sisters and brothers’ in China. A story from Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo News:
Carlos Hernandez awakened very early Monday morning; he’d just returned from his freshman year at Georgetown University in Washington and was still on “East Coast time.”
Flipping on the news, he heard of the devastating earthquake that had struck near Chengdu, China, a sister city to Phoenix and an area Mr. Hernandez had called home for four weeks during the summer of 2006. Fearing for the people who had hosted him when he served as a Phoenix youth ambassador, he fired off e-mails to his Chinese brethren.
Hundreds of others who had traveled from Phoenix to Chengdu as part of sister city exchanges – from students and teachers to firefighters, police officers, and judges – awakened with the same reaction. They immediately reached out to their friends and counterparts in Sichuan Province’s capital, a city of some 11 million people located 60 miles from the epicenter of Monday’s earthquake. The confirmed death toll in the region reached 19,509 Thursday, and China said the number could rise to 50,000 once all the missing are accounted for.
