Let's take a break

With the recent Earthquake in Haiti, the third world's lack of resources have been put into the spotlight again. While watching the constant videoclips of their suffering, i'm sure that many of you reached into your pockets and donated money to places such as Red Cross, Unicef, and maybe even through the White House Blog.

Monetary donations are a great way of helping them, however, recent economic troubles has given the average family less money to donate, but there are different ways to help those who are suffering in the Third World Countries other than giving money.

1) www.freerice.com

Possibly my favorite, freerice is simply a site where you answer quick definitions, math problems or similar factual information questions. The main activity is one where they give you a word and you pick the definition from the options. Their other activities are similar to these. For every correct answer, freerice gives 10 grains of rice to the needy in third world countries, which adds up pretty quickly. FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program with their partner, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, which means that this is definitely not a scam. The past year they donated over 43 billion grains of rice to hungry people all over the world. This is a great way to not only help the hungry, but also a great way strengthen your vocabulary, mathematics, and geography skills(among others).

2) www.freepoverty.com

Freepoverty is a site that fuses the Facebook staple, Traveler IQ, and freerice together in their attempt to provide water to those who need it. For every correct answer(where you correctly find the city on a map) they will donate 10 cups of water, another resource people in the third world do not have. This is another way to help your geography skills.

3) www.ripple.com

Ripple is the last site, and the easiest to do by far. All you need to do is click a link and they will donate resources on demand. They get money from their adverts that allows them to donate money, food, water and education to people who need them.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "Sweet! Now I don't need to reach into my pocket for my donations!". These ways help but giving organizations such as UNICEF and the Red Cross allows them to continue their operations in ways that the sites I've shown could not. Because of that, I advocate donating monetarily and using these sites.