Actress and ex-model Angie Harmon is turning a planned New Year's (12) vacation in India into a humanitarian trip for United Nations officials.
The former Law & Order star is set to visit friends in the country in January (12) and she has decided to dedicate some of her vacation time to Unicef (United Nations Children's Fund) to aid a series of new projects there.
Harmon showed her support for the organisation on Tuesday (29Nov11) by attending the 2011 Unicef Snowflake Ball in New York, and she reveals her charity work in India only began to take shape this week (28Nov11).
She tells WENN, "When I heard that 21,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes, that just struck a chord with me. I lit the snowflake last week and I just started up this relationship with (Unicef) and I wanna be a part of what they do, who they help. As a matter of fact I had a meeting with Unicef yesterday...
"When you think about it, my children make it through the day unscathed; they have clothes, clean water, food, they have a roof over their heads, they have medicine... everything. Twenty-one thousand a day, it's just... no, that has to be stopped. It's preventable and I'm gonna do everything that I can. Wherever they send me, that's where I'll go.
"We have India at the end of January. I'm visiting friends, but they also happen to have a couple of things that are going on that we just discovered yesterday, so I'm very, very excited."