Wednesday 8 August 2012

Syria Raffleblog day 22 - £1425

Raffleblog has been a bit quiet for a few days - just catching up with myself.

So, a quick report. Very excitingly, Stephen Fry has agreed to tweet out the raffle appeal. The man has got over four and a half MILLION followers, so if that doesn't whip up a bit of cash, I don't know what will. If our server doesn't crash.

Sue Lloyd Roberts, the Newsnight journalist has been in touch after I contacted her - she's just back from an undercover trip to Syria, and as well as giving the most generous prize of a week's stay for two in her beautiful Mallorca hotel, has also agreed to do the raffle draw on what I'm planning as an evening drinks fundraiser on Thursday 13 September. I just have to get a goddamn venue that doesn't want to charge me £600, which one place I give a lot of business to told me would be the charge. I practically fainted, then sent a very snitty email back. Not very professional of me, but good god, I mean, it's like taking antibiotics out of the mouths of children who will die without them. Literally. It really, really made angry.

So, the donations are coming in which is fantastic, but we need more! Please, if you can, share the JustGiving page with your networks, and encourage people to enter the raffle - it's a real, practical thing you can do instead of wringing your hands in front of the news, which is worse and worse for civilians by the day.

This is a bit of a downer of a Raffleblog, isn't it? I sort of knew there would be those days. I'm also feeling incredibly upset after watching an Aljazeera report by Andrew Simmons showing a two year old toddler being worked on for an hour by horrendously stretched medics in a clinic awash with blood, who then died. I have a baby who's nearly two, and the thought of his body torn and shredded by a shell is beyond bearing. A five year old boy also died in the same clinic. My other son is four, and I see their perfect, beautiful bodies and ache for the parents who have lost their children. It's like a desecration of something that should be absolutely beyond anyone's capacity or imagination to destroy.

If you'd like to donate so that Hand in Hand for Syria can buy stuff that will give some of the wounded a chance of survival. you can here.


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