Three young cousins from Monroe, Michigan, are helping Samaritan's Purse help the people of Haiti by selling cookies.

Taylor and Emalie Krupinski and Gracie Ourlain watched television news reports about the earthquake. Taylor, 9, has been studying natural disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes at school, and understood what the impact of such a disaster might be. She recruited Emalie, 7, and Gracie, 6, to help.

Their families decided to donate proceeds from the cookie sales to Samaritan's Purse. The girl have raised $500 so far for the cause and would like to raise $1,000.

Read more about Taylor, Emalie, and Gracie on the Monroe News website.

Alan Wood, Regional Manager for Samaritan's Purse in Wales, is part of our global response to the disaster. He wrote the following for our UK website.

Three of us were in a pickup truck on the road back towards Port-au-Prince from Leogane. Outside the towns there are small settlements at regular intervals along the edge of the road or in the fields next to it—extended family groups or larger clusters up to village size. Sometimes these dispersed groups can miss out on the help more readily available to obvious large settlements in and around the major towns.

A senior SP worker had visited one such group and left plastic sheeting for shelter a day or so previously, promising to return with more help as soon as he could. This time we pulled up, got out the pickup and scrabbled up the low, dusty embankment. The half a dozen women and children in view suddenly became a small and friendly crowd.

One of the men stepped forward. “I thought we wouldn’t see you again,” he said, putting words to the quiet fear of abandonment which is commonly felt by those who have been left with so little.

We shook hands, chatted a little and then brought back two bales of Samaritan’s Purse blankets from the pick-up.

As we were getting ready to say goodbye, my colleague asked if they would like him to pray for them. I will never see a more eloquent answer as everyone—men, women and children—dropped to their knees as one and bowed their heads in a dignified silence.

In that late afternoon amber sun, under a dust-coated tree by the road, God brought His soothing peace to aching hearts and anxious minds.

Kirk Nowery, Chief Operating Officer for Samaritan's Purse, was featured in local media coverage of the barge loading in Fort Pierce, Florida, on Monday. Below is a video posted by TC Palm, an online news service covering Florida’s Treasure Coast.

Samaritan's Purse staff writer Gary Martyn blogs about meeting five special girls in an earthquake-ravaged neighborhood.

I was a little apprehensive about walking into the Cite Soleil slums in Port-au-Prince. The place has a reputation for being dangerous.

More than 200,000 people live in a tangle of one-room shacks, patched together with rusted sheets of corrugated metal, or poorly-made block homes, many of which collapsed during the earthquake. Now it’s worse than ever.

Every other home was in ruins. The people were making the best of it, living in homemade tents and making do with what they could salvage from the debris.

People were curious, peering at us from doorways and saying hello as we walked by, but there was no danger. Like everyone else we met in Haiti, the people of Cite Soleil were people in need.

As we turned a corner, a group of five little barefoot girls let out squeals of delight, and for some reason they all ran up to me and grabbed my hands. They didn’t ask for anything, they just wanted to show me around the neighborhood. I was their new best friend.

Whenever I looked down at the girls and smiled they beamed and squeezed my hands tighter.

Like kids who had been playing outside anywhere, my little guardians had dirty faces and clothes to match. But then I looked around and realized that these kids basically lived outside all the time.

I tried not to step on any toes as we strolled along. It had been a long time since I held my own daughter’s hand when she was small. It brought back fond memories and I suddenly looked at these little girls with different eyes. What if these were my little girls and we were living in a slum after an earthquake destroyed our home? What would we do? What kind of a rescue would I want for my children?

I squeezed their hands again and smiled, knowing Samaritan’s Purse was planning to distribute blankets and shelter materials to help protect little ones like these from the cold morning dew and rain. I heard that food and clean water was also on its way. None of it seemed like enough, but help was coming.

When we reached the end of the path, we were standing on the edge of a busy roadway. I couldn’t speak Creole, but I told my friends that they couldn’t go with me any further and waved goodbye. They all smiled and waved and ran back down the dusty pathway to go home.

I’ll look for them again when we come back on Friday.