For Southern California's Venezuelans, the news from home has been unbearable — and unbearable to watch from a distance. So they have gone to work.

A café becomes a lifeline

When the twin earthquakes struck northwestern Venezuela on June 24, Amara Barroeta was in Pasadena, far from the rubble but not from the grief; her hometown sits near Caracas, one of the hardest-hit cities. Within days she turned her shop, Amara Chocolate and Cafe, into a relief hub, pledging a large share of a day's sales to earthquake relief and pointing customers toward vetted charities, ABC7 reported. "It's not just the food that you eat," she told the station, "but also the hug that the Venezuelans need."

Boxes bound for Caracas

A few blocks away, Chamo Venezuelan Cuisine became a drop-off point, its floor filling with sleeping bags, blankets, hygiene supplies and canned goods donated by people who drove in from as far as Santa Barbara and Bakersfield, NBC Los Angeles reported. Owner Yesika Baker said the supplies were headed to a Venezuela-based nonprofit for distribution. A volunteer sorting boxes said the response had spread almost entirely by word of mouth: "Simple human needs."

Prayer in East L.A., donations downtown

The effort has taken other forms, too. Dozens of Venezuelans gathered for Mass at a sanctuary in East Los Angeles — not a fundraiser but a shared reckoning with helplessness half a world from the disaster. In downtown Los Angeles, the arepa restaurant Full Arepas became another collection center; its owner, Kelly Montano, who has relatives still unaccounted for in the disaster zone, kept accepting supplies anyway. "It makes me strong," she told CBS News Los Angeles. "But it's hard."

The scale of the disaster

The June 24 quakes — a magnitude 7.2 shock followed seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 — flattened buildings from the coastal city of La Guaira into Caracas. Preliminary official tallies placed the death toll at more than 1,700, with thousands injured and displaced, the United Nations reported, cautioning that figures were still rising. Los Angeles County firefighters are among the international search-and-rescue teams deployed to the disaster zone — a detail that has given Angelenos watching from afar a thread of connection to the effort.

How to help

Community members have pointed donors toward established relief organizations, including GlobalGiving, Direct Relief, the International Rescue Committee and United Way, which are running Venezuela earthquake funds. Locally, Amara Chocolate and Cafe and Chamo Venezuelan Cuisine in Pasadena have been coordinating in-kind donations; both have posted current needs and drop-off hours on their social-media accounts. It is, as Barroeta put it, a community trying to do what it can from thousands of miles away — "one cup of coffee at a time."