READING, Pa. – The death toll continues to climb, and hundreds are still missing days after a devastating 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Colombia.<\/p>\n
“People in our committee, some of them have injured family members,” says Jobany Bedoya of Union Colombiana.<\/p>\n
“Some of them have lost their homes. I was with a friend yesterday whose cousin, unfortunately, was crushed to death. Her husband survived in the rubble, but he’s intubated,\u201d Bedoya added.<\/p>\n
Through Union Colombiana, Bedoya is working on efforts to get supplies to those in need.<\/p>\n
“Even the government in Colombia is still scrambling, trying to figure out the best approach,\u201d Bedoya says.<\/p>\n
Donations will be accepted at the HGSK law offices on N. 5th Street in the city of Reading.<\/p>\n
Items most needed include things for sleeping, baby care, and first aid supplies.<\/p>\n
“The local DoubleTree downtown Reading was super gracious,” says Bedoya. “[They] have always been a great partner of ours and their housekeeping department has offered tons of blankets, all kinds of sleep stuff.”<\/p>\n
Right now, the group is NOT accepting donations of water, clothing, or things like toilet paper, which he says are still available in Colombia.<\/p>\n
Union Colombiana is working with a company that will help ship the items next week, so donations will only be accepted through next Tuesday afternoon, August 18th.<\/p>\n
“The whole point of this is to just help others in need, and that’s what we’re trying to get across,” says Bedoya.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – The death toll continues to climb, and hundreds are still missing days after a devastating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[29817,2347,36876,4509,93855,7336,539,736,128,130,129,31039,112228,11413],"class_list":["post-265835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-colombia","tag-community-support","tag-disaster-relief","tag-donations","tag-earthquake","tag-humanitarian-aid","tag-pa","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-supplies","tag-union-colombiana","tag-victims"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}