Roby + Momrath, please post

[SBmom]

I have just returned from a trip to all this news and I am so happy to hear of your safety robyrm-- I did not realize you were in Indonesia. Has Momrath checked in?

Mini, Good luck on your mission. We know of a great charity, Direct Relief, that will be getting medical supplies over there too. Stay safe!

[mom60]

Direct Relief is a great organization. They are soliciting donations if anyone is interested www.directrelief.org. D and I have done volunteer work there and they are an amazing group of people.
Mini take care on your trip.

I am pretty sure Momrath is in Bali. Which has been safe. The new statistics from Sumatra are no surprise (as many as 25,000 dead I heard this morning), but the numbers are probably much higher. The lack of on the ground NGO groups has negatively impacted the speed with which relief services have come to be. There has not been, for example, a Red Cross presence there for ?months as the government had clamped down on the presence of any foreigners-- due to the separatist insurgency.

We are still waiting to hear if anyone we know was affected in any of the "tourist" locations outside Indonesia. Because there had been such signficant travel warnings for Indonesia, I think people had probably chosen Phuket instead of Bali in some cases...

[marite]

Here is the link to the website of the Phuket international hospital. It has lists of dead individuals, sick and wounded patients, with nationality, ages, and so on.

http://www.phuket-inter-hospital.co.th/siriroj.html

No familiar names at first pass on the list of those hospitalized.. We had stayed at the Sheraton Lagoon during this week 3 years ago- it is one of the 5 hotels in the area hardest hit. We had kayaked around Phi Phi, hadn't stayed there..I can't help but think of the "pattern" of daily life at these resort areas. In the early morning you see mostly families with the youngest children on the beach, adult couples walking. The teenagers are still in bed.

It is interesting, of course, that the first "face" of the tragedy has been that little Swedish boy...in that probably of the 35000 counted dead thus far, maybe 1000 will turn out to be "European" in extraction...and of those as yet uncounted, probably even a higher percentage will be non-European...

[cheers]

Oh no, R. The Swedish boy isn't the primary face on the BBC or Sky International. He's been story number six or seven on the broadcasts I've seen.

The numbers of dead are horrific and the footage even worse. So, so sad.

Cheers,
Well fortunately some of his family was found. Some of the new footage is shocking, isn't it. Honestly, I fear for horrible things out of Aceh. Usually in the face of a local disaster, and of course we have had many, the embassy and other expat affiliated groups would have contacted us by now regarding assisting relief efforts. I am not sure if the lack of requests to this point are due to the timing (holiday) or the government's generally tentative seeming response. So hard to know.

We are just sitting tight for now, but hope there is something we can do, soon...

[cheers]

Haven't had the news on yet this morning, but did see a report on a Sky reporter trying to get to Aceh. He was left on the tarmac with so many other cargo planes. He decried the lack of runways in Aceh. Not sure if that is the case or, as you suggest, the government is deliberately witholding response.

He also mentioned that he'd heard that very few survived.

I agree, very worrisome that you haven't been called...

[optimizerdad]

I spoke to my mother last night. We are originally from Madras in South India, and fortunately all our family members there are OK.

She mentioned that when you arrive in the main train station in Madras, it appears to be life as usual - there's no sense of being in a city hit by a disaster like this. It's only when you get to the beach that the enormity of what happened hits you. Unfortunately, it's the poorest people who got hit the hardest - they are the ones who live right on the water's edge. When you have just a single survivor from a large family, the human mind just appears unable to comprehend the size of the tragedy. Parents, sisters, brothers, children - they've lost everyone and everything.

[texas137]

What a horrible tragedy. It's the people here on CC and other internet forums where I am active have have provided the "faces" for me. The sheer masses of people involved are incomprehensible. My heart goes out to everyone here who has family or friends affected, as well as all of the people we will never know about.

[mini]

Seoul Airport –

Uneventful thus far – already 18 hours traveling. I got into a nice, long conversation with a United Airlines steward about the tsunami. Luckily for me, Aliyah was along for quasi-scientific questions. Through pure serendipity, she had taken a class at Smith in the geology department on “Natural Disasters” last term, which put her about 98% ahead of us mere mortals. We discussed how for the last hour in the airport, I watched CNN News as they played and replayed the destruction of the tourist resorts in Phuket, Thailand, the “amazing story” of the reunification of a little one-year old BLONDE boy with his BLONDE grandparent. It makes for good press. The wave against the marble swimming pool made for good visuals.

But I explained how the press hasn’t even touched my mother’s area of India, which is not in the least bit remote, and has millions of people, but no BLONDE people, and no tourist resorts. Apologies to all blonde people reading this – it has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the way the media has decided to portray the rest of the world.

Actually, there has been even less coverage of Bangladesh. As I wrote in a series of articles almost 20 years ago, deforestation in the Himalayas has resulted in tens of thousands of tons of soil being washed down to the mouth of the Ganges River, where it empties into the Bay of Bengal some 3,000 miles away I even have pictures of the rivers in the mountainous regions being choked with debris from mudslides and landslides (which was also the beginning of the basis for my children’s story “Gaura Devi Saves the Trees” – which is in “The Healing Heart~Communities” storytelling book. But meanwhile, huge new islands formed in Bangladesh at the mouth of the river, underwater four months a year, and tens of thousands of people have built houses on stilts – there is just no other place to go. I imagine many of them have been washed away, but I have yet to hear a single news report from Bangladesh, and it makes me – sorry – angry!

I got to thinking – sometime last summer, out of the blue, and I really don’t know why, which I’ve learned probably means it is really important – I started exploring some old Talmudic lore about a man called Og. Og doesn’t actually appear in Genesis (or at least in the Noah story), but in Talmudic lore, Noah took only his family aboard the ark, but at the last moment, with the waters rising, a man named Og found a ledge – really just a chink of wood – on which he sat and hung and refused to leave, despite Noah’s insistance. For an entire year, with the waters swirling, he hung on, and he was fed (what, I don’t know) through a little opening in the ark’s side. In some versions, he is an evil ogre, who is supposed to serve Noah when they leave the ark, or he will turn wild (“feral”?) again.

What if the story were different, though? In Jewish tradition, there is “midrash”, where you can take a tale and turn it upside down and inside out and empty out its pockets, and see what comes out. What if Og was a warning to Noah that one should not, one CANNOT abandon one’s neighbors, whatever the situation? Maybe Noah didn’t hear God entirely clearly (after all, remember, even in the traditional version, he is a drunkard.) What if Og sits on the ledge the entire year, banging on the outside to be let in, and he was the point of the whole story – God put Og up to it, and Noah is just the agent that allows God, through Og, to make a point! What if Noah, after deforesting the area for 100 yearsm was just willing to pick up his family (and his favorite furry friends) and sail away to mess up the next earthly installment, but Og is a reminder that you just can’t do it?

Appa – my father….is Og. He is 91 and said to be very frail now, though apparently they’ve nursed him back to reasonable health (though he can’t hear much, and can’t see.) He has been arrested so many time for protesting against the predations of the illegal prawn farms, salinating the soil, ruining the watertable, cutting down the mangrove forests, etc. – all for profit and prawns on our salad bars – that the government is now afraid to arrest him, for fear that he’ll die in jail. (The first time Aliyah met him was in the Madras City Jail when she was 3.) He is Og, and he won’t let the corporations come in and make a quick killing (figuratively and literally) with “hanging on” to them.

So now he’s a prophet. Too many dead to rejoice in prophecy, though now that I think of it, that's often the way prophecy works. The irony is that he vowed not to die until all the multinational shrimping companies were out of India, and we all assumed it would take 40 years, and would joke with him about it. I wouldn’t be surprised to arrive in two days to discover that they are all gone, carried off on the big wave. It is unlikely they could rebuild – the soil will now be so saline, that the shrimp won’t survive. The death of “slash and flood” aquaculture. But so many dead with it.

I have no idea what we’ll be doing when we get there. It’s not a bad space to be – we’ll just do what we are called upon to do, and, hopefully, get to write about it. I’m not much at digging wells, I can’t give a vaccination, and I can haul some bags of rice, but I’m not all that strong either. But I can play with kids at the orphanage (kids like me for some strange reason), console those I can, and write! It will be enough.

Thanks for your prayers, good thoughts, and contributions (after the international media tires of the story, we really are going to need all three!)

[jamimom]

I know some of the kids on CC have posted how terrible it is that we make a big deal of the tourists, Americans, and Europeans that have been affected. But you know, that is a
natural thing. We first think of our own families, then our extended families, our close friends and so on. The circle extends that way. And by showing that the disaster has hit those we may know as well, does bring in more funds and relief effort which for now is the most important thing.

Jamimom,

I completely agree with your analysis of this. I, at least, remember being a young teenager and wondering where in the world Bangladesh was, etc,and just having the sense that there were these parts of the world where tragedy after tragedy took place and that they were so very remote from me.

But that was pre CNN and I think today one of the jobs of journalists is to help us all feel that we are more the same than we are different. I suppose that for some this means that the first faces we see have to be familiar to us...and in fact, of all the places where this disaster has impacted, the beach resorts of Phuket surely have the best infrastructure and were the first that journalists could reach in a meaningful way.

In the modern era of communication and news delivery no teenager should have any doubt about where this is taking place, what the challenges are, what the unique issues are for each location. At the school my children go to there is a unit taught in MS about the Holocaust. It frames the historical and human rights issues they are learning about.

On a different scale, this event can also be a learning resource. Kids can learn about the religious and ethnic conflicts impacting these locations, the geographic peculiarities of the Maldives, the various religion's responses to suddent death, the economics of relief....etc. The list can go on and on.

If it has to start with a little Swedish boy, so be it, but if in the end the average American kid doesn't know anything more about this part of the world than I did 35 years ago, it will be a huge, huge shame.

[marite]

The best thing would be to contact regular relief organizations such as Oxfam-UK (Oxfam-USA covers a different part of the world, apparently), Save the Children, the International Red Cross. At the moment, it seems the best thing to do is to send money rather than packages. The immediate need is for water, vaccines, tents, blankets. The Indonesian government has been keeping Aceh out of bounds because of the ongoing insurgency, but even in places where access is easier, it may not be possible to accommodate and organize volunteers yet. I'll be interested in hearing what Mini finds when he gets to India.

[sandiegomom1]

I will join Mom60 in mentioning Direct Relief International as another option. They are small enough to be flexible, partner with local organizations, and have very low overhead/fundraising expenses. You can Google on Direct Relief International.