In talking to people about my project, and in talking to Nola, the director of BattleBotsIQ, a fair number of responses we get when we describe kids building BattleBots is something along the lines of “it’s violent.”

Now I could go off on a whole other post comparing BattleBots injuries to football, boxing, or even cheerleading (all sanctioned sports), but that’s not the point of this post.

When 9/11 happened, Nola described how some kids said, “My BattleBot is tough enough to go into the collapsed buildings and could’ve helped rescue people.” Today that’s the exact case with Haiti – so many collapsed buildings could use rugged robots to go in, find survivors, and help free people.

Will, one of Fluffy’s creators, summed BattleBots up pretty well compared to other robot competitions. He says it’s the only competition that fully tests your robot. If everything isn’t perfectly built 100%, your opponent, physics, or the BattleBox will destroy you.

Who’s going to be building the future rugged robots that are going to help out in future disasters? The students who are building BattleBots today.

I also wanted to touch on how amazed I am at the wonderful use of technology in providing aid. Of course there’s Twitter and the Red Cross text messaging viral campaign, which alone has raised over $10 million.

I also just saw a post released by the White House that they’ve created a Person Finder app, where you can either look for someone or list information about someone. It’s embeddable, which you’ll find below.

[Well apparently it's embeddable anywhere except WordPress blogs...]

Finally, I just wanted to shed some light on some areas and organizations that I doubt will ever get exposure. This past March I went to Haiti for the first time and loved the experience. I stayed in Leogane, a city about 30 miles west of Port-au-Prince.

We stayed in a sort of Bed & Breakfast, run by Yoleine, a Haitian native who goes back and forth between New York. She also runs a school across the street from the Bed & Breakfast.

This is the City Hall in Leogane.

This is one of the classrooms.

And here’s one of the students in an outside building, eating lunch the school would provide.

From what I’ve heard, everyone is alright. However, Yoleine’s Bed and Breakfast collapsed, along with the smaller school building where I took the photo above. Fortunately the main school has remained.

Yoleine has some property a little outside of the city, which she’s turned into a tent city to house the now homeless.

I’ve tried searching everywhere and I couldn’t find one news update on Leogane. While of course Port-au-Prince severely needs help and probably has the most number injured, the news organizations are acting like the earthquake took place there, when in fact Leogane is closer to the epicenter and needs help just as much.

So if you’re looking for a cause that mainstream news media and foundations haven’t reached yet, please give to Yoleine’s NEGES Foundation. I know the website looks like it was built in the 90s, but I assure you it’s legit and they desperately need money, supplies, and all sorts of aid.

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