Please help

The thing about spending a white Christmas in Montreal is that you end up spending alot of time indoors, mostly at home, which is fine for us since our uncle's place is pretty cool and he's got cable (which is always good). But the past couple of days have been a rather unsettling time to be watching TV. The news coming through the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been primarily about the disaster in South Asia.

If you can, please help these people in any way you can. We'll be donating some money to the relief fund and we appeal to those of you who can to please help out too. Doctors Without Borders, the International Red Cross and UNICEF are acccepting donations of any amount, and with the profound extent of the devastation only just surfacing, the affected countires need all the help they can get.

What is so sad is that the countries hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami are also those who were the least prepared for it, in more ways than one. Some of them are extremely poor- and now that the waves have also hit Somalia and some Eastern African nations, this can only get worse- and many of them have no idea how this could have been averted in the first place. South and South-east Asia have not been particularly suceptible to natural disasters, except maybe volcanoes in Indonesia; as a result, we've always thought of ourselves as safe from them. Now that whole coastal areas have been wiped out and cores of national industries gutted (e.g. tourist resorts in Phuket and the Maldives), these already beleagured countries have only years more of financial and infrastructural recovery to look forward to, and we haven't even begun talking about investing money and expertise in early warning systems that could have helped saved thousands of lives.

There is also the human drama behind it all- parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, siblings, cousins, relatives, etc. Familes are being displaced physically and emotionally on a scale I can only imagine, but feel the immense grief of nonetheless.

What is even more worrying are the long-term consequences of this disaster- we're talking contaminated water, faltering sanitation and increased incidences of diseases. If you add search and recovery costs, rebuilding homes, medical services, re-establishing vital infrastructure, this eartquake will cripple economies in a way rivalled only by war. As one of the CBC correspondents said, this could be the single most devastating natural disaster in modern history.