Asian Tsunami Relief
It was about 6 am when my wife woke me up and said 'why are you shaking the bed'? I woke up with a start. The bed was quivering. I knew immediately it was an earthquake. I rushed to my son's room. He was fast asleep. but I saw him shaking from side to side. Woke him up. Said I think we should go downstairs. In the drawing room, a chest of drawers was rocking very gently, very ryhthmically, against the wall. After about 5 minutes all was still. Later that morning my wife and I went shopping. It was only when we returned home around noon that my son said, hey, there's been some sort of tidal wave or something, about 100 people are dead in Chennai. That's where we live, Chennai, formerly known as Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu, a premier South Indian state. Chennai is about 3000 km from where the megaquake happened in Sumatra, Indonesia. But we felt not only the quake, but our beautiful Marina Beach, reputed to be the second longest in the world, was devastated by the tsunami that followed. A close friend of ours, who was out fishing at Muttukkadu, 20 km from Chennai, was hit by the wave.. a strong swimmer, he was taken and smashed on to the highway about a km from the shoreline, bleeding from head to toe, without a shred of clothing left... Another friend, who lives by the sea in one of Chennai's beautiful seaside suburbs, barely escaped the sea's fury.. she climbed on to the roof of her house and witnessed a tsunami in full flow.. 'the sea', she said later, 'was boiling'.
One CNN reporter who visited Ground Zero..Aceh, Indonesia.. said that he'd covered earthquake disasters in India and elsewhere earlier, so he thought he was prepared for the damage he expected to see after the Tsunami.. but he was almost at a loss for words. The devastation is so overwhelming, he said, that the only possible parallel he could think of was probably Hiroshima. That's how bad this is. It's not just immediate relief.. it's going to take months to recover bodies alone, and many years to rebuild the shattered coastlines and communities of Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Our contributions therefore can't be just a one-time thing. As Kofi Annan said, this is an unprecedented calamity which calls for an unprecedented response. All suggestions are welcome. I've set up links to some of the important organizations accepting relief- click here
posted by Hatch @ 3:30 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
While it is correct that the utmost importance be given to human life at this point in time, it is also very necessary to give a thought to the thousands of animals that have been affected - thousands dead and very many displaced, homeless and starving because their owners are either no more, or living in relief camps. In South India, just one organisation is valiantly attempting to tackle the relief work - the Blue Cross of India. They have sent ambulances and teams of volunteers, staff members and vets to feed and treat the affected animals, to set up temporary shelters and to intervene in cases of cruelty or abuse. Help is coming in, in the form of donations and offers of assistance but the task is gargantuan, homes and shelters need to be found, and many animals are suffering from lack of clean drinking water and food.It is very much upto animal lovers to come forward and show their support. Blue Cross can be reached through their website, http://www.bluecross.org.in ..Devika, Chennai, India
There are lots of Government organizations and NGOs doing great work in the affected areas.. one private organization, the Bhumika Trust is doing truly remarkable things out there. I must post a link to their site here as, while they are using their own funds, they need all the outside help they can get, because they are doing and supplying stuff that people really need. The 'What We Need Today' tab on the site sets it out nicely. http://www.tsunami-india.org
Well, it looks like this is a dead topic. I joined a traffic exchange, http://www.blogexplosion.com, that professes to bring visitors to your blog.. but they rejected my blog saying 'there is no recent activity'. I guess the Asian tsunami is history, though it is very much an ongoing project, with help still required in terms of funds and other inputs. The huge scale of the disaster is lost in the fickle sands of modern time and interest parameters.
ONE post is not active. A blog by definition is a updated journal. ONE post FOUR months ago is by no means an active blog.
Update it yourself. There was once a time where we had to post on our blogs and use our content to get our own visitors and not expect a FREE company to do all the work for us.
I should know. I get 1500 per day for many reasons and one of them is posting more often than every 4 months and not calling a free service every name in the book.
If the Tsunami is such an 'ongoing' project then bloody post about it on your BLOG! There's a novel idea. THEN maybe with some RECENT activity your blog would get approved.
Of course with an attitude like yours I tend to doubt it.
Well, well, well. Wonder of wonders, someone's posted to my blog! And I wonder who that someone is. The name is appropriate, anyway. But they've got their facts twisted. It's not 'ONE post in 4 months'. There were already 2 comments on the original post. Secondly, the links given in the original post/comments point to pages/sites which are very much active in terms of the topic concerned, which is the relevant thing here. This blog is not some frivolous personal diary. It concerns one of the biggest disasters in history, one to which the blogger was himself a witness. Thirdly, I AM getting my own visitors and not just relying on the 'free service'. Those are interested visitors who actually click through to the relevant sites, and are not just surfing for credits for their own blogs. Fourthly, I don't see where I have called this poor so-called free service 'every name in the book'. I merely said that it was sad that the 'currentness' of my blog was judged using shallow parameters. Methinks bitchalious doth protest too much on behalf of a third party (?), and hope now considers my blog as 'active'!
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