Oh, I can remember being a Hurricane Hugo victim. A tree fell on my car and the mobile home I lived in blew off it's blocks. I was out of work cleaning floors and windows for a couple of weeks. (Yeah, I was the very stereotypical JW.) A wonderful family donated a car to me, volunteers fed me and gave me enough canned goods to last two years. Volunteers offered to right my mobile home, but I was just renting and the landlord waited for the insurance company to come through.
But all of that was from individuals, not Watchtower. BUT WAIT: Watchtower determined that I suffered extreme financial loss and wrote me a check. No kidding. How wonderful Jehovah is.
The next year, I was a Hurricane Andrew volunteer, pounding nails on roofs in south Florida and Jehovah was giving some cash to victims there also. How wonderful Jehovah is.
But something different happened after that. Somewhere between Hurricane Andrew and Hurricane Katrina, Watchtower figured it out. They had to spend donated money that was specifically earmarked for disaster relief on the disaster victims. So they did two things: 1. Insist that people donate only money instead of clothing and cars and canned goods and that money should just go into the general funds and not be earmarked. 2. Organize and manipulate the volunteer spirit and use any earmarked money to fund the Watchtower-controlled building committees or buy supplies only from the same channels that they use to build Kingdom Halls.
It doesn't surprise me that they referred someone to a charity that they are not part of. I don't automatically discount them for doing that, but I truly believe that were the Catholic or Lutheran Church to refer a member like that, they would also write a check from Catholic Charities or Lutheran Church Charities to that same Indiana organization. Then Watchtower would say how they are just doing that for self-serving reasons like seeking the limelight.
