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GREENSBORO — We feel helpless. Maybe that’s it.

We see the photos and hear the stories and wonder about the boyfriend wailing in the street among the bodies of the dead.

Then, we learn the numbers. At least 100,000 dead . Tens of thousands injured and orphaned. All by a Jan. 12  earthquake in a place where today people clinging  to hope sing in Creole, “Please, don’t let our house fall.”

Haiti.

So we act.

A fitness instructor organizes an aerobics fundraiser. An adoption official holds a beach music concert. A Guilford College student rounds up her classmates and professors and convinces them to auction their art.

Two local TV stations, WFMY and WXII, raise more than $350,000 . The Greensboro chapter of the American Red Cross brings in more than $275,000 in donations .

And last weekend, a birthday girl asks for donations, not presents. Her final tally: $61 .

Everywhere you turn in our corner of the South, someone is raising money to help Haiti recover from the worst catastrophe in its history.  

We’ve had it tough. The economy hasn’t been kind to us. Yet, we give. Or think of some way to give.

Kathleen Kennedy  had no money. She’s 28 , a Guilford College senior. But she does have artwork. So, last weekend, she sidelined her life and in a week put together a silent art auction.

Final count: $3,000  for an orphanage in Haiti and a Quaker humanitarian group.

“I wanted to do it right away before another big story came along and caught everyone’s attention,” Kennedy said.

Chris Roulhac  couldn’t shake the image of the distraught boyfriend lying beside his dead girlfriend. Then  she got an e-mail from musician Rich Lerner.

Lerner knows Roulhac. She helps lead the Piedmont Blues Preservation Society, anchors a popular radio show on Guilford College’s WQFS (90.9 FM) and says to everybody, “Bless your heart.”

Five years ago, she organized two benefits across the Triad — 60 bands and 11 clubs for one; 72 bands and 12 clubs for the other  — and raised $18,000 following Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Southeast Asia.

In his e-mail, Lerner asked if there should be another benefit for a new cause: “You know, I am a big believer in the power of music to do good.”

There will be one  Sunday. At The Blind Tiger. For Haiti.

“It’s like the 'Little Drummer Boy,’ “ Roulhac says. “He didn’t have anything to play except his drum. You want to help.”

Tommy Lineberry  has no connection to Haiti, but he works with the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina . So he knows orphans, and he understands the pain behind their looks. He saw that on TV during reports on Haiti.

On Wednesday night at the Empire Room in downtown Greensboro, Lineberry did what he does often — raise awareness and money for local orphans in need. This time, it was for orphans in Haiti.

He used beach music.

On Saturday, Leisa Bridges  will use exercise.

She’s a personal trainer, an aerobics instructor and the mother of three children, ages 7, 4 and 18 months . She heard the stories, thought of her own kids and prayed for guidance.

She got an idea. She calls it an aerobathon.

 “I think a lot of us believe we have this perceived set of limitations of what we can do,” Bridges says. “But we’ve all started to cast that down and say, 'I don’t have any limitations. I can do something.’ “

She will. Just like that little girl with the birthday.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com