16 June
2006 Articlesender.com
By Danny Wirken
Hasselt, Limburg
You're a young
mother in New Orleans when the levee breaks. With no time to evacuate,
you and your three children take refuge on the roof of a neighbour's house,
hoping to be rescued quickly. You're not; eventually, after 24 hours, a
Coast Guard helicopter comes by, gives you some clean water, and offers
to take your two younger children, though they don't have room for you
and your teenager. You send them up, and three days later are evacuated
yourself, with no clue where your two year old son and five year old daughter
have been taken. The possibilities include shelters from Houston, Texas,
to Boston, Massachusetts – a range of over 2000 miles and 200 shelters.
With no money and no car, how do you locate your children? And how do you
endure the frantic feeling of panic and emptiness when you don't have your
children where you can ensure they are taken care of?
You are the British
mother of a student at New Orleans University. On August 31, you turn on
the television and see the destruction of the city unfolding before your
eyes as the city floods, stranding tens of thousands of people and killing
many hundreds. You call your daughter on her cell phone and get no response;
you know, of course, that the hurricane knocked out the cell phone towers,
and there is no phone service in the city. Even if you buy a plane ticket
and fly out that day, how do you find her?
Your cousins have
taken their father, your brother, on holiday to Phuket, Thailand, during
Christmas 2004. You watch in horror the day after Christmas as a tsunami
erases much of that coast from the map, killing hundreds of thousands in
a disaster few could have imagined. How can you possibly find your family
members?
Communication:
The Key to Knowing
The biggest problem
with disasters, after the rescue of victims in imminent danger, is always
communication. How can you find the ones you love? The Red Cross, though
they want to help, have their hands full rescuing those in trouble and
feeding and clothing and caring for those who desperately need their help.
The rescue services in the area of the disaster are doing the same thing.
Telephone lines and cell phone service is typically down, knocked down,
destroyed, or washed away.
But in the most
recent crises, there has been a difference. Satellite-linked laptop computers
were brought into the affected areas in the earliest stages by the Red
Cross and other rescue organizations. Instead of dealing with the logistics
nightmare of communicating massive amounts of communication by physically
sending information in or calling it in when phone service was made available,
online services were made use of, and volunteers and others filled in databases
and gave victims access to whatever email services they had.
An even better
tool was found by the time of the New Orleans flood – online forums, where
people could publicly post information from both victims and those seeking
information about their loved ones. Suddenly, an avalanche of information
was available online at forums. Not only were people finding one another,
but volunteers were finding that a great way to find agencies that need
their help was to seek them out in online forums.
And soon, people
were able to ask questions: what was it like to be caught in the filthy
floodwaters of New Orleans for three days? Did murders really happen in
the Superdome? When the tsunami came, why didn't people just run away?
Did it really wipe out entire towns? What about the fishing communities?
And they got real
answers from people who had been there. Horrifying answers. Those answers
inspired people to help, either with cash or with volunteer work. Others
started talking about what happened, what could be done to change things
so that these disasters never happen again. Still others opened their homes
to victims of the disasters.
It is grassroots
community service and politics at its purest: those who want to know, receiving
information from others who know all too well.
Community Forums
as Social Activism
Online community
forums with a focus on social service are cropping up everywhere, helping
people to meet, disseminating information in an orderly fashion, and encouraging
people to give cash and physical assistance to those who are suffering
simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Anyone can register
to participate in an online community forum. And anyone who needs help
can ask for assistance at an online forum; if they don't get a person personally
offering to help, they'll find information about how to access government
and aid services.
But community
forums are, as the name implies, online communities. They run on the people
who register, who volunteer to be active and who help others by posting
information and spreading the word outside the forum in blogs and other
publicly accessible resources. Communities without people in them are nothing.
For this reason,
it falls to people like you and me to make community forums work. At the
very least, register and look at what is there. You may find a place where
you can share a little bit of information; or you may find a need that
you are positioned perfectly to fill. For instance, community forums inspired
military housing companies to offer some of their empty units to hurricane
victims, and hundreds of children were motivated to run their own charitable
drives to send supplies and money to the victims of the earthquake in Kashmir.
The next time
disaster strikes, while you're watching the images on television as the
tragedy unfolds, log on and see if you can find community forums for the
disaster. It's a way you can look for ways you can help, instead of wringing
your hands because there is nothing you can do.
Whether it's finding
the right charity to donate money or goods to, or to call to offer your
assistance, or looking for more direct ways you can help by arranging places
for victims to stay, an online forum will be able to direct you.
In essence, online
forums help you help others. What more could you ask for from the Internet?
--Danny Wirken--
The author is
involved with the following project:
Tsunami.ws
Tsunami Forums.
Article provided
by Articlesender.com
