Date:    Fri, 31 Dec 2004 23:10:57 -0500
Kathleen Bruce wrote:

< I wanted to take a quick moment to
bring the disaster in Asia to our minds...as we move into the New Year.

< As we head into our individual New Years plans and reflections I just
wanted to offer a list of some organizations that are organizing
relief.

Kathlees and everybody:

If I may (very briefly) add to that: It is good that the international relief agencies are emphasising the need for *money* so that appropriate relief supplies can be purchases for each area.  This will hopefully prevent the situation in earlier disasters and war zones, where large amounts of artificial baby milk and poorly labelled or out-of-date pharmaceuticals were donated (dumped), tying up relief workers in sorting and safely disposing of unusable goods.  Or encouraging Mums to feed their breastfed babies these foreign "gifts".

It seems to me in this present catastrophe likely that there will be even more mothers bereft of babies who were swept away than babies who've lost mothers. Infants are light and the rush of water was strong.  There was a widely reported case here of an Australian father who held tightly to his baby, but when the force of the water eased, he ws devastated to find he was holding only a bundle of the baby's clothes.  The baby had been sucked out of them and washed away. There will be many more situations like this, the stories never told.  In the worst-hit areas, it would be likely (and TV coverage suggests) that only those who could run, and the lucky, survived.

As Kathleen says, gifts of money to the appropriate aid agencies will get help to *where* it's needed, and it is sorely needed.  As this is off topic, I'll say no more.

Virginia
in sunny Brisbane

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