As I write this, it's about one hour and 22 minutes past the deadline for the feds matching donations to tsunami relief.

It's about 12 hours and 50 minutes since I read a Globe and Mail story that said Federal tsunami aid hits $425 million ... as cash woes hurt African AIDS fight.

Here is an excerpt from it:

Mercy Otim has watched the international fundraising for tsunami relief with a sense of awe teetering on disbelief.

Ms. Otim, 37, is a Kenyan activist in the Pan-African Treatment Access Movement. She devotes her considerable energy to raising funds for lifesaving anti-retroviral treatment for the estimated three million Kenyans living with HIV-AIDS and the 28 million people across Africa who have the virus.

Always, from international donors and aid agencies, she hears the same refrain: There just isn't enough money.

International donors have pledged more than $5-billion (U.S.) to tsunami relief, compared with $3.6-billion spent by Western governments on global AIDS last year.

"This has proved the money exists -- it's there," Ms. Otim observed yesterday. "They can get hands on it quickly when they want to."

Since the tsunamis struck on Dec. 26, 136,000 people have died of AIDS, 6,500 people a day in Africa alone. The tsunami death toll stands at about 150,000.

While 50,000 children are believed to have been orphaned by the tsunamis, Unicef says 11 million children have been orphaned by AIDS in Africa.

The tsunami-relief pledges may soon equal the total amount, $5.8-billion, that the United Nations received for all humanitarian relief around the world last year.

Oxfam has received $4.3 million in donations over the tsunami. In a normal year, it collects $500,000.

Medicins sans frontieres (Doctors without borders) collected $350,000 last year after a publicity campaign to raise money to help those affected by civil conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan.

There was also a sobering commentary by Parker Mitchell and George Roter of Engineers without Borders called Africa's Silent Tsunami. It is walled off by the Globe as paid content.

But it makes the point that 130,000 people per week die in Africa as a result of preventable causes -- about seven million per year.

While Canada has stepped forward on the tsunami front, only .24 per cent of our GDP was directed to foreign aid in 2003. The only stingier country was the USA.

"Canada's response to disasters shows our deep-seated compassion," they wrote. "If we were to work resolutely to reduce poverty and mitigate the effect of future disasters, it would show the world that our commitment to charity is deeper still."

More on this in the coming days, because I want to make some sense of it, but it's bedtime now.