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