Charlene @ 9:52 pm
Bonnie and I had a chance to volunteer today at Georgia Tech – they are operating a Red Cross shelter at their Coliseum. Before we volunteered, I definitely felt somewhat of a heaviness, and though it’s for a terrible reason, it made me feel better a bit for myself that I could try to provide some tangible assistance.
It was a four hour shift – 11am to 3pm – and it was exhausting. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t due to the volume of evacuees or the stories, but rather primarily from dealing with frustrated volunteers and donors and general disorganization.
Continue reading “Post-Shelter Volunteering”
Tags: currents
Charlene @ 4:28 pm
What if, even, say, within the Astrodome, that your husband or child or cousin was on the other side of that 15,000-person cot city but you never bumped into them? What if, because of lack of communication, and people scattering, and people thinking one another are dead, that you settled down and never knew that your loved one was still alive and well somewhere? To me, that’s one of the worst possibilities of this disaster. Especially if you never got word confirmed of them dying, you would always wonder if somehow, somewhere, they were starting a new life just like you were.
Even for someone who has relatively few ties to a family, like me, that’s a tragedy.
I don’t know what can be done to really link shattered families and friends back together. If the reunion effort is anything like the rescue effort, I wouldn’t give it a snowball’s chance in hell. It’ll be too little, too late.
I can imagine, geekily, something electronic – a database registering everyone who takes refuge anywhere in the camps that have been set up – but you’d need everyone to interoperate, and everyone to fully disclose. Would you trust the government that didn’t save you to re-register all your personal data for good, not evil?
Even then, you would miss people who went elsewhere on their own.
Maybe it’s too late…
Tags: currents
