As the first US military aid reached Haiti, help was also arriving from the Haitian-American community, with one effort led by Wyclef Jean, the hip hop musician, who has drawn on his celebrity connections and telephone philanthropy to raise more than $3 million (£1.85 million).
As the artist, who was born in Haiti, joined volunteers pulling bodies from the ruins of Port-au-Prince, describing the scene as “the apocalypse”, his Y?le Haiti charity, which has run development projects on the island since 2005, has now shifted its focus to disaster relief, soliciting donations at $5 at a time by asking people to text a code on their mobile phones.
Jean, who made his name as frontman of the the Fugees and is a nephew of Haiti’s Ambassador to the US, has already received a $1 million donation from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who have visited Haiti several times in recent years as goodwill ambassadors for his charity.
Jean said: “We spent the day picking up dead bodies, all day that’s what we did . . . there has to be 400,000 to 500,000 people that are about to die. We have to raise a million dollars a day. In four or five days, this whole country is going to be in chaos.”
In the Little Haiti district of Miami, the Haitian-American community was mustering donations for private relief missions of its own. “It’s Haitians helping Haitians. We cannot stand by idle,” said community leader JeanRobert LaFortune.
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The supermodel Gisele B?ndchen was reported to have pledged $1.5 million to the Red Cross, George Clooney said that he would organise an MTV telethon, while other celebrities urged fans on networking sites and TV shows to donate and leading companies and banks also pledged large amounts.
The public was warned to check the authenticity of donation websites, however, as fraudulent operations were reported to have increased and some sites have been infected with viruses.
Y?le Haiti has also apparently been in touch with Tiger Woods, the golfer. “I heard Tiger Woods donating to send a cargo plane with a mobile hospital out there,” Russell Simmons, the hip hop mogul, posted on Twitter.
It was unclear whether Woods, who has been in hiding since November after cheating on his wife, had agreed to the donation. A spokesman for Simmons said that he was expecting to talk to Woods yesterday to “ask for his heart and his hand”.