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But for all the strutting and spitting, the overwhelming response was one of mercy. The money came so fast it crashed the website of Catholic Relief Services. Save the Children was logging more than 10 times the normal volume of calls, so that everyone from the CEO to the custodians was recruited to man the phones. Some groups, like M??decins Sans Fronti??res (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), actually announced that they had taken in all the money they could use for tsunami relief and began directing donors to their general disaster funds, because other places in the world still need help even if they don't make headlines. But the charity toward the tsunami victims was unrelenting. Kids in Michigan sold hot chocolate; in North Carolina they sold lemonade; students in an eighth-grade class in Wenatchee, Wash., voted unanimously to give their class-trip money, which they had been raising for more than a year, to the Red Cross. There was Sandra Bullock pledging $1 million, Willie Nelson scheduling a benefit concert, NBA players offering $1,000 for every point they scored during games played late last week, and Helen E. McKenna, 88, a widow in San Francisco, donating her whole month's Social Security check. "My family was saying I was getting too old to handle my own money and that I should get a financial adviser," she said. "But it's my money. I can do whatever I want with it."
The same technology that has made this the most intimate of modern horrors has vastly increased the size and speed of the response. Relief organizations that used to have to wait for the check to come in the mail were receiving 80% to 90% of their donations online and moving the money out into the field faster than ever before. A dollar donated in the U.S. to Action Against Hunger, for example, is wired from New York City to the headquarters in Paris, where it buys water tanks, pumps, pipes, testing kits or chlorine tablets. Those supplies are shipped to international staging grounds in Igualada, Spain, near Barcelona, flown to Colombo, Sri Lanka, then trucked to a place like Batticaloa, on the island's northeast coast. Time elapsed from donation to distribution: 48 hours.