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I saw pictures of the Aceh area on Sumatra. It was an airview of what was once a village, and was now a bunch of concrete floors and some scattered broken trees and mud. There was nothing left.
Watching the news reports is like watching some kind of macabre auction - how high will it go? So far, over 126 000 are confirmed dead.
As for Norway, there are 21 confirmed dead (among them a woman from my home island, and several children) and there are over 400 missing, including 100 children. And a lot of survivors are complaining about the government not getting their act together fast enough, with letting bureaucracy slow down some of the process like not letting people fly home without ID the first day (which Sweden did for their citizens) and not accepting offered air ambulances from an organization that could have had help there within hours 'because we didn't know there were people who would need them and because goodness, we can't let people get assistance unless we're 100% sure we're sending fully qualified people' - yes, I am sure NLA has no clue what they're doing.
Some organizations have encouraged people to donate money instead of spending it all on fireworks today. Firework salesmen (who are only allowed to sell fireworks one week all year anyway) are complaining that such statements make them go out of business. Cry me a river.
Happy new year. I am going to make a donation to Medecins Sans Frontieres. And I think the reason you can't donate to the international Red Cross directly is because the national organizations are supposed to take care of that in their respective countries.
(And yes, I am obsessively missing my sweetie this holiday)
Watching the news reports is like watching some kind of macabre auction - how high will it go? So far, over 126 000 are confirmed dead.
As for Norway, there are 21 confirmed dead (among them a woman from my home island, and several children) and there are over 400 missing, including 100 children. And a lot of survivors are complaining about the government not getting their act together fast enough, with letting bureaucracy slow down some of the process like not letting people fly home without ID the first day (which Sweden did for their citizens) and not accepting offered air ambulances from an organization that could have had help there within hours 'because we didn't know there were people who would need them and because goodness, we can't let people get assistance unless we're 100% sure we're sending fully qualified people' - yes, I am sure NLA has no clue what they're doing.
Some organizations have encouraged people to donate money instead of spending it all on fireworks today. Firework salesmen (who are only allowed to sell fireworks one week all year anyway) are complaining that such statements make them go out of business. Cry me a river.
Happy new year. I am going to make a donation to Medecins Sans Frontieres. And I think the reason you can't donate to the international Red Cross directly is because the national organizations are supposed to take care of that in their respective countries.
(And yes, I am obsessively missing my sweetie this holiday)
