The sum of all parts

We may not all be able to give on the scale of Bill Gates, but don't we have to believe that every little bit - even our own - really does help?

Thank goodness for people like Bill Gates. Have you seen that he is donating $10 billion (Dh36.7bn) for vaccines in developing countries? $10 billion. That is more than the GDP of Mozambique, the Bahamas or Nicaragua. It's a staggering sum; one which, Gates says, will be donated from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charitable body that the Microsoft chairman and his wife set up in 1994. Over the next 10 years, the funds will be used to research new vaccines and bring them to the world's poorest countries.

It got me thinking about charity. I have yet, I am ashamed to say, to make my donation to Haiti. The pictures on the news are absolutely heartbreaking. And I do intend to act. It's just that I haven't quite got around to it yet. It's dreadful, I know, especially as stories of aid not getting through and millions of starving and injured people are just starting to shift down the main headlines - an indication that their plight is being replaced, inevitably, in the public consciousness by the latest company takeovers, political wrangling and sporting scandals.

There is part of me that thinks that no matter how much my donation is, it's never going to make much difference. I remember stories of how some of the aid meant for the 2004 Asian tsunami victims was siphoned off by government officials and never reached its destination. It was so grimly inevitable, I suppose, but so depressing. Of course, the other part of me knows that if we all thought that way, there would be no help at all for these poor people.

I have done a little research, and the number of organisations involved is overwhelming. There are the usual celebrity-fronted ones, involving earnest pleas from Charlize Theron, Drew Barrymore, Ben Stiller and the Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean. But for some reason, I am loath to help through them. Then there are the charity music compilations, which would be great, because then I get some tunes out of it. But there is something a bit grim about that, too. My eye keeps being drawn to Médecins Sans Frontiéres (Doctors Without Borders), who provide medical aid in 60 countries, and whose hospital in Port au Prince, I heard on the news, was destroyed in the earthquake. I feel, rather instinctively, that that is the way to go. In fact, I'm doing it right now. It's not a Bill Gates-like sum. But I have to believe that it's a case of every little bit helps.