Red Cross Blogs

In the shoes of the Asia Pacific disasters survivors

By Sarah Oughton
October 1, 2009 at 5:08 pm

One week, one typhoon, one tsunami and several earthquakes. Can you imagine what people living in the Asia Pacific region must be thinking right now?

I know I’d be feeling pretty scared and pretty vulnerable. If I was in their shoes, I know what I’d be hoping.

Yesterday morning Katrina, my colleague, blogged about the appeal we launched to respond to Typhoon Ketsana. Since last weekend, it has left a trail of destruction across south-east Asia, slamming into the Philippines before moving west to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

As we scrambled to respond to the typhoon, details of the earthquake and resulting tsunami in Samoa on Tuesday were still emerging. So far, we know it claimed more than 100 lives but this number is expected to rise as search and rescue operations progress.

As Samoa Red Cross volunteers started evacuating people to camps on higher ground and distributing relief items, at the British Red Cross we were working out how to best support this second disaster when the third one struck.

Yesterday, at 10.16 am GMT, an earthquake, magnitude 7.6, struck off the coast of Indonesia, followed by a second quake at 1.52 am GMT this morning.

More than two million people have been severely affected by this shocking series of disasters and we’ve launched the Asia Pacific Disasters Appeal to raise money for those in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

Can you imagine what it must feel like to live in such a disaster-prone part of the world? You never know when another disaster might strike.  What do you do if you can’t turn to your neighbour or your family for help because they have also lost everything?

If I was in their shoes, I know what I’d be hoping. I’d be seriously hoping that people around the world – people who don’t even know my name – would still care enough to put their hands in their pocket so that me, my family and my community could receive international assistance.

Please take a few minutes out of your day to make a donation to our appeal. And please ask your friends and family to do the same.

Thank you.

Image © Reuters/Erik de Castro/courtesy www.alertnet.org

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Tags: Asia Pacific, disaster, earthquake, Emergencies, emergency response, flooding, floods, Indonesia, Philippines, Samoa, tsunami

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Emergencies, Fundraising and events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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