Want to help your friends and family during hurricane season? Use this guide to find out how. Help in the US, Mexico or the Caribbean.
3 ways to help hurricane victims
3 ways to help hurricane victims
Hurricanes are scary and disruptive. Watching them happen to your friends and family from the sidelines can make you feel helpless. But there are things you can do. With the 2021 hurricane season in full swing at the moment, you might be looking for how to help prepare or how to help hurricane victims. This guide is meant to help you search.
Hurricane season: When and Where?
Both the Atlantic hurricane season and the Caribbean hurricane seasons start around the 22nd of may and end around the 30th of November. The peak generally happens in August & September. The countries affected by hurricanes are mostly in the Caribbean. Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti are hit often. But Mexico and the United States have plenty of problems with hurricanes as well.
Help hurricane victims with mobile recharge
There are plenty of reasons why topping up your friends’ and family’s phone is important. Keeping up to date with the latest developments is incredibly useful. Landlines can break down during a hurricane and when you lose power in the house you also lose WiFi. Having a mobile phone up and running can make the difference.
During a hurricane it can be easy to become overwhelmed by the chaos. Making sure that you can always stay in contact with friends and family means you can help them, or get help to them, when disaster strikes.
You can top up someone else’s phone with call credit and data in multiple ways. Check their provider to see if they allow you to top them up from a distance. Recharge.com also allows you to top up someone else’s phone. You can find the explanation of how this works here or you can top up directly. It’s an instant way to help hurricane victims.
Help Local Relief organisations
You can help hurricane victims by supporting relief organizations. Organizations such as the red cross provide help to hurricane victims. You can help them do this work either by volunteering for them or by donating your money.
If you have the time you can volunteer to help aid hurricane relief workers. The best way to do this is to officially sign up. Chaos usually reigns just after a hurricane and relief organizations are overwhelmed. Getting into your car and randomly arriving to help is admirable. But there is a chance you’re just adding to the chaos. You can sign up to be a hurricane relief volunteer with the red cross here. There are plenty of ways you can help, from delivering food and giving shelter and comfort, to helping search and rescue operations. So you’re sure you can help in a way that you feel comfortable and able. You can find more info on being a volunteer for a disaster action team here.
Want to volunteer abroad, to help hurricane victims in countries like Cuba and Mexico? You can! Find all the possible places and ways you can help abroad here.
Don’t have the time, or don’t feel comfortable volunteering? Don’t worry, you can donate money instead. Find out where you can best donate your money with this handy guide focussing on local relief organizations. You can also donate money to national disaster relief organizations, such as the Red Cross, or international organizations, such as Save the Children.
Help hurricane victims to prepare
It’s incredibly important to be prepared for a hurricane. You can help your friends and family get prepared even from a distance.
So what do they need? The basics are simple. First of all they need to stock up supplies such as bottled water, canned food, first-aid kit, and emergency care tools. It’s also useful to have batteries for the radio or TV and a full powerbank for mobile phones. Last but not least it can happen that hurricane victims lose access to their bank account because of power failures. In that case having cash on hand can be incredibly useful.
So how can you help hurricane victims before the hurricane? Of course you can provide a checklist and give moral support from a distance. But practically you can help by giving them money directly. Using bank transfers to do this can be slow and as stated above, access to a bank account can’t be taken for granted. What you can do is buy an Openbucks voucher for your friends and family. Why Openbucks? Because it’s accepted in pharmacies and many offline shops across the US and in some places abroad. That makes it a convenient way to pay in a crisis like a hurricane. You can order Openbucks right here on Recharge.com.
We hope this guide has helped you help hurricane victims this hurricane season. You can find more tips and ideas in this article.
Written by
Ravian Ruys
