Donating money to verified organizations helps more than sending clothes, and supporting the person helping matters just as much as helping
SANTO DOMINGO – It's six in the morning and the phone is already ringing before I've even had my first coffee of the day. A building in Caracas split in two. A resident of La Guaira digging with his bare hands. And that unspoken question that nonetheless lingers: would my building withstand that?
It's not paranoia. It's shared geography, and also something simpler and more human: empathy doing its job.
Feeling from afar is not feeling less
Spanish psychologist Margarita Velascoín, an expert in emergencies at the Official College of Psychology of Castilla-La Mancha, explained in an interview with the COPE network that being far from the tragedy and receiving the news only through the media generates a particular feeling of helplessness, different, but real, to that of someone who experiences it up close.
And he added something that explains why the consequences of the earthquakes in Venezuela affect some Dominicans more deeply than others: those who have already experienced something similar tend to feel the current situation with greater intensity.
On the side of the earthquake, in Venezuela, psychologist Isaliv Matheus, a professor at the Central University of Venezuela, offered in an interview with teleSUR an interpretation worth bringing to this shore: the massive outing of people to the streets to distribute water, coffee or food is not an anecdotal gesture, but a sign of collective health in the face of fear.
Empathy, understood in this way, is not an emotional luxury or a productive distraction, but rather the response of a functioning social system.
But empathy also gets tired, as explained by psychologist Yorelis Acosta, also from UCV, who has been practicing for almost forty years and spends entire days coordinating psychological support teams.
She told CNN en Español something that applies equally well to a rescuer in La Guaira as to someone in Santo Domingo who hasn't put down their phone in a week: fixed schedules, boundaries, and rest are necessary to avoid empathy burnout. Constant worrying isn't solidarity, it's exhaustion. And exhaustion doesn't help anyone.
A familiar mirror
Here's something that hits close to home for this publication, though almost no one remembers it: the Dominican Republic has already been on the other side of this equation. When Hurricane David devastated the South and Southwest of the country in 1979, it was Sweden and the United States that provided the funding. This same Media Group recently documented this by reviewing the 1981 INVI Annual Report, deposited in the General Archive of the Nation: that donation ended up financing the reconstruction of 4,134 homes in the hardest-hit areas. Repairs, materials, labor: aid that arrived from abroad when domestic resources were insufficient.
Forty-seven years later, the gesture is reversed and, as reported by the Presidency of the Republic, the Dominican Government sent a specialized search and rescue team to the Cemed as part of Operation Quisqueya Solidaria 2026.
A decision made after a direct call between President Luis Abinader and the acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, and that Dominican contingent ended up being the first international aid to arrive in the state of La Guaira, the hardest hit by the double earthquake.
When the sector becomes a bridge
What's interesting for this column is seeing how the Dominican commercial and real estate sector transformed itself, in a matter of days, into an infrastructure of solidarity. In an official statement, the Ministry of Defense acknowledged the work of the Rannik Group, the Sambil shopping center, and the State Radio and Television Corporation in organizing the donations that ultimately traveled by sea to Venezuela.
And as reported by El Caribe in its coverage of the collection points set up across the country, the Dominican-Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce established a center inside Sambil Santo Domingo, while BlueMall opened another in its administrative offices. Spaces designed for selling and consuming were transformed, without much warning, into meeting points for giving.
It is an uncomfortable yet useful reminder: a country's infrastructure, its shopping centers, its business chambers, its media, is not only measured in square meters or occupancy, but also in how quickly it can be reorganized when needed.
Solidarity that lasts is the one that is organized
Argentine psychologist Ailin Di Nasso, who joined an international psychological first aid team as a volunteer, told the Argentine media outlet MDZ with a phrase that should guide any solidarity impulse, personal or corporate: good intentions are indispensable, but when faced with people in extreme vulnerability, clear protocols and trained teams are needed.
Translated into everyday terms: donating money to verified organizations helps more than sending clothes. Supporting the spirits of those who are helping is just as important as helping. And remember, when fear starts to ask, "What if it happens to us?", that the best answer to that question isn't paralysis, but what we're already doing: organizing to give, just as someone, not so long ago, organized to give to us.
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