A statement was made by our government that we would help. The mechanisms to do so according to my friend who worked for AID are no longer in place. Don’t want to get political, and am anxious to see how this plays out. Lindagaf, your idea of Oxfam as a less American charity is a good one. Another is International Rescue Committee, who have been involved in SE Asia for a very long time. Mercy Corps is another that has worked previously in Myanmar. Due to the civil war, the people of Myanmar have been hurting for a very long time.
The videos of the building under construction that collapsed in Bangkok are reminiscent of 9/11. Workers from Myanmar do a lot of the construction in Bangkok and I’m sure their folks were impacted in an outsized way. It is odd however, as nothing else collapsed in BKK, other construction projects included, though there may be a great deal of structural damage to be discovered. Bangkok is not considered to be especially seismically active, though Myanmar, sitting at the juncture of several tectonic places, certainly is.
I went on what was at that time a standard 7 day tour of Burma, the old name for the country, in the early 1980s. It has been isolated from the modern world for decades and felt a little like time travel. People were sweet and the pagodas astounding.
For whatever reason, I was awake in the middle of that night post earthquake and finally gathered myself together to call my elderly family member in Bangkok. She was fine, said she was eating lunch when she thought she had become dizzy. The dining room light fixture was swaying and she realized the building was moving. Nothing fell. Two building employees, who keep an eye on her, pounded on the front door and got her down to the courtyard, where she sat for several hours in the shade before returning to her flat. Relieved and grateful here, that the employees took care of her. Things could have been far worse, for her as well as many others.
The situation in Myanmar is horrific and so sad.