Moms ask Utahns to give up one luxury item a day to help Haiti

One day last week, just a couple of days after the earthquake in Haiti, Cherise Udell ran into her neighbor, Leah Moses-Gandhi, and noticed that she, too, had red, puffy eyes. Both women, it turned out, had been crying about the misery of a country in ruins.

Udell is a passionate woman who will only be sad or angry so long before she wants to get up and do something. Three year ago, for example, the valley's pollution spurred her to organize Utah Moms for Clean Air.

Sitting on her sofa and crying over TV images of earthquake victims wasn't helping anybody, Udell decided. So by early this week she and Moses-Gandhi had formed Utahns United for Haitian Earthquake Relief.

Like several other fledgling groups and countless individual Utahns, the two Salt Lake women are trying to figure out how to channel their empathy. The trick is to try to help from thousands of miles away when you're not a doctor of relief organization that can, as the cliche goes these days, put boots on the ground in Haiti.

So the two moms who started Utahns United for Haitian Earthquake Relief will do what moms are good at: encourage the rest of us to share. They're urging Utahns to give up one "luxury" a day — a latte, perhaps, or a smoothie or dinner out — and donate the money to one of three non-profits they say they've vetted for their "solid reputation." They're hoping to visit schools and businesses to spread the word that even $3 can help, and that $3 a day is even better.

"We're calling on every Utahn to give money this week and next week and onwards," Udell said at a press conference Tuesday at the Salt Lake City main library. Her group singled out Utah-based Healing Hands for Haiti, plus Partners in Health, and Chance For Children.

Lisa Bagley, co-founder of Healing Hands for Haiti, said that the money directed to the group's rehabilitation clinics will provide food, water and electricity for clinic staff and patients, as well as neighbors and orphans now living in what is left of the compound there. Donations will eventually help rebuild the clinic, and continue the work of providing artificial limbs to the unusually high numbers of amputees in the country — numbers that are now four times what they were before the quake, she said.

Right now, says Susan Everts of the Greater Salt Lake Area chapter of the American Red Cross, money is the best way to help. People who would like to eventually travel to Haiti to volunteer can start by signing up for free classes through the Red Cross, she says, so they'll have skills when volunteers are able to travel to Haiti.