Disaster Days Stories. ABOUT random volunteerism.

Responses to posts in Friends’ page/s. 

I BELIEVE, it is not you or our individual sincerity to help. It is mainly because aid and info are scattered on Social Media that systematizing distribution and actual volunteer-to-victim help has gone confused or harder to attend to. I remember when we (a small group of Asheville friends) drove to New York City in 2011’s “Occupy” protest, with almost a "truckful" of farm food to donate, which I saw ended up being thrown away. Not many places to cook them and people don't really need food, it was Wall Street country. 

       Best way to help is to go to a friend or friends' house or area and hand out necessities, from our own resources and those that we picked up from donation areas. Many don’t have a way to drive out to where relief commodities are handed out. 

       Me and my housemates’ “little” aid, our way? On Facebook, I focused on directing first-response aid (and info knowledge) from those volunteers online near my isolated friend and her neighbors in Hendersonville. Make sure they are all safe and fed. And when I was sure roads had been cleared by professional rescuers, we drove there to give follow up help. (Most of the people there don't use Facebook or social media even if they have power, which they still don't have). 

       Meanwhile, we here in the house offer our Starlink access to neighbors; my housemate and his teenage daughter have been bringing the gadget (since Saturday AM or first day after the fact) as well to several areas, powered mostly by his car, so people can communicate or go online and use their phones for obvious reasons. 🌬💨💓

IT is a general/organizational decision, I reckon, for her (staff at rescue base or HQ) to "remove" your info. So they could process info and donation more systematically and hopefully, faster. Same with media before the advent of social media. The desk in the office quarterbacks 7 to 10 (depends on resources) reporters with photographers each to strategic areas, during and after the disaster. Info that we called in or faxed or Morse coded (yes) are deliberated by editors before printing and sent for public consumption. Then we do updates or follow up stories. 

       Relief organizations or NGOs follow basically the same system. Until social media was born. But that's only my insight and based on my experiences, being born in a "disaster country" and as a journalist and aid volunteer in two continents. 🌬💨💓

NO way to really figure out the veracity of "stories." Media sources (including local news) are doubted or negated due to crisscrossing, conflicting, exaggerated or "diminished/controlled" takes, opinions and insight by people on Facebook or social media. Then there's the political Left vs Right anglings. 

       My family abroad and in New York and the West Coast know I am safe because I told them and I am alive and unscathed. But details? Despite availability of news all over, who knows--not even Asheville residents, who were far from the “line of “hurricane/flooding” fire” actually know. 🌬💨💓

(Photo credit: USA Today.)