The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami
posted by Sunil Malhotra at 14:12
Now that the first "wave" of emotion has receded and the space allocated by the media has waned, let us rededicate ourselves to Phase 2 - REHABILITATION of peoples impacted by Tsunami 2004.
2 Comments:
I haven't yet been able to find one reputable Indian organisation that has progrmammed a credit card web for worldwide access directing donations to local Tsunami charities. For example, the Times of India has a charity section but not recognisably a Tsunami charity box. Or what about one of the local tourist organisations?
It would have been a lot easier to mail around to international friends if there had been a one click bookmark
Longer term there are several industries that I believe we should openly appeal to:
why cannot DD and BBC media do a joint forward documentary seies covering who most needs help, who are the deep community rebuilding heroes, investigating what mistakes if any in terms of coastal development may have agravated the Tsunami's rush - doing this all round the ocean shores impacted; this could be linked to one common virtual conversation area where redevelopment project needs could be discusssed and to the extent that some local solutions franchise across cosstlines , the wheel is reinvented everywhere whilst at the same time deep cultural diversity is honoured.
I also suspect the worldwide travel agency has a job to play : why not a tsunami brochure with 4 sections: areas ready for business as usual; areas taking guest as volunteers; areas in desperate need of redevelopment; other holidays sponsored by organisations giving some of their knowhow to the Tsunami coastlines. I feel a joint brochure keeping all countries in the news is a good approach, and the process of developing a local correspondent network mixing what travel hosts already contribute to areas where local observers need to act as grassroots correspondent is natural both for a printed brochure and perhaps a virtual web that someone like google could help interlink. Such a international ocean-coastline corespondent netowrk also seems to be a vital development so that if another time alarm bells need to ring a message can go outr to every community fast
In respect of such a humanitarian disaster, the least the world could do is learn to start multinational development projects linked by the geographical contexts not separated by national borders. I feel that from what I have seen so far in terms of charity & goodwill it is the people in foreign countries that have led governments and media; if the silent humanitarian majority could keep standing up the world over, we might yet induce governments to work on a more cooperative and human future world map than we currently have. Simple as I am, there is something deeply wrong with so much defence budgets being spent between rival countries, and so little afforded to watching out for nature.
Hey! I'm a volunteer on the tsunamihelp blog which I see you've got links to. Jump in there - we could use lots of ideas.
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