Thirty-Nine Seconds Apart: Together for Venezuela

On Tuesday, July 28, our club gave the whole meeting to one subject: the earthquakes that hit Venezuela a month earlier, and what Rotary is doing about them. The briefing came in two halves — a situation report from our own PR Chair, Alejandro Morales, followed by Dr. Mark S. Vasconcellos, President of the Rotary Club of All Nations, presenting Together for Venezuela.

The full briefing deck is available here: Earthquakes in Venezuela — Club Briefing (PDF).

Two quakes, thirty-nine seconds apart

On June 24, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck the Venezuelan coast. Thirty-nine seconds later, a 7.5 mainshock followed. Since then, 1,275 aftershocks have been recorded.

The numbers, drawn from UN OCHA Situation Report No. 21 (14 July 2026), are hard to sit with over breakfast: 4,734 people killed. 16,740 injured. 6,462 rescued alive. 17,907 people who lost their homes. Eight hundred fifty-six buildings were affected, 190 of them collapsed outright. Direct damage of $6.7 billion — about six percent of the country's GDP. The UN has appealed for $930 million to reach more than 1.3 million people over six months.

Today, there are 107 transitional camps across Caracas, Miranda, La Guaira, and Aragua. Families are living in tents.

What the photographs showed was harder to summarize than the statistics. A tower sheared clean off its foundation. Apartment blocks whose ground floors pancaked while the upper floors stayed intact. A hillside that gave way and took the homes below it. And then the buildings that did not fall — schools like U.E.N. Doña Virginia Pérez de Oramas in Aragua, standing but cracked through a load-bearing beam, waiting on an engineer's signature before a single child can go back inside.

Rotarians were there in week one

The other half of the story is that Rotary did not wait. Members of Rotaract District 1960 have been running supplies into the affected areas since the first week — handing boxes off the back of trucks, working the distribution lines, setting up handwashing stations, tent by tent in the camps.

Most of the people in those camps are children. So alongside the water and the first aid, there were toy tables, balloons, and crayons. Recreation counts as relief.

Dr. Vasconcellos then took the podium to place that work inside a greater effort. He chartered the Rotary Club of All Nations in April 2021 alongside our own PDG David Hayden — North Carolina's only Rotary club founded by an all-minority leadership team, with members from Guyana, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Liberia, Pakistan, Palestine, and the United States. Together for Venezuela is exactly the kind of project that the club exists to run: Rotarians in one country organizing on behalf of neighbors in another, because the network already reaches there.

Why we serve

The Four-Way Test asks whether what we do will be beneficial to all concerned. It does not ask whether the people concerned live within driving distance.

That is the whole argument for Rotary's international work, and it is why a breakfast club in Raleigh spends an hour on Aragua. The same club that funds the Styres Scholarship for a Wake County student and wired a school in Uganda for electricity can also put water, gauze, and sleeping mats into a camp outside Maracay. Service Above Self does not come with a radius.

In keeping with Rotary tradition, Dr. Vasconcellos presented a club banner, which our president, Joshua Davis, accepted on behalf of the Rotary Club of the Capital City.

Four ways you can help

We will be sharing more information about the ways we can all help. For now, the following are good places to start:

Give to Together for Venezuela. Dr. Vasconcellos's project is accepting donations directly: secure.actblue.com/donate/vzla.

Give to ShelterBox. ShelterBox is Rotary International's project partner for disaster shelter, and cash moves faster than goods.

Give through The Rotaract Foundation. A North Carolina 501(c)(3) (Tax ID 88-1240439) supporting Rotaract San Joaquin's service projects in Venezuela. Daniel Zavala's GoFundMe, Help Venezuela Recover After the Earthquake, buys supplies outright — mainly for Caracas. Contributions are tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Join our supply drive. We are organizing a club supply drive for the camps in Aragua — Turmero, Maracay, and San Jacinto — built around what the camps themselves have asked for: medical and first-aid supplies, medicines, drinking water and infant formula, soap and nappies, sleeping mats and towels, notebooks and crayons, solar lanterns and cups. The drive is being planned within the club now — if you want in, talk to Alejandro and the club.

Come and join us

We meet Tuesdays at 7:30 AM at Carolina Country Club, 2500 Glenwood Avenue in Raleigh, and on Zoom. Some mornings we talk about a scholarship. Some mornings, we talk about a golf tournament. And some mornings, like this one, we talk about a camp in Aragua and what we can put on a truck.

Come sit in on one. Breakfast is on us.