I have raised and personally donated over $15,000. |
I send donations for the main charities I support via the Australian charity portal, Global Development Group where there are many projects you can select to donate to. These are:
COPE Laos for prosthetics, $6,250 donated
Apopo Hero Rats, Mine clearance in Cambodia, $4,750
Ukraine Humanitarian Aid for Refugees ($1,600 donated)
I started supporting COPE Laos after visiting Laos and discovering there are around 80 MILLION unexploded bombs, when it was carpet bombed during the Vietnam War. Many people are killed or maimed each year by the UXO, unexploded ordnance. I have visited the COPE Laos office in Vientiane, where there is a museum and a clinic where they make and fit the prosthetics. COPE stands for Cooperative Orthotic Prosthetic Enterprise. On our second trip to Vang Vieng, I discovered the disused runway in the middle of town had been the USA bomber base, used to bomb Vietnam and Laos. 240 million bombs dropped on Laos, with one third not exploding. My attempts to write about it on Tripadvisor were censored out. Truth is not welcome in the USA, who last declared war, on Japan, in World War 2, but have been at war most of the time since, and never clean up their mess.
In 2016 my wife and I visited the Apopo project in Cambodia, an hour or so out of Siem Reap (city of the temples of Angkor). There are around 5 million mines plus other UXO scattered around Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime. We witnessed the wonderful Hero Rats in action, Giant Pouched Rats from Africa, which are trained to sniff out unexploded mines and bombs. What a great job they do.
In 2023 I donated $1,600, split between two humanitarian charites dealing with refugees in Ukraine. At least a third of the population have been displaced, with over 6 million having fled the country.