An Urgent Call to Act

After reading one of the featured news from Yahoo last night, my mind was deeply disturbed. As I was lying in the comfort of my bed, my mind couldn’t help wandering off. Questions popped up in my mind one after another. How is the situation there? I am lying cozily here in my bed but how about the people? Still stranded in the open without any shelters, clean water, foods, clothing and blankets? It is probably night time over there and as the chill of the night sets in, people in the hardest hit areas, will probably be trembling and freezing. As I thought about these, my heart felt heavy. I read that the death toll could hit as high as 10,000 and leaving many missing and homeless. Just a moment ago, I read the update from Yahoo that the death toll soared above 22,000 and more than 41,000 others were missing.

The force of nature is definitely not one to be reckon with. Cyclone Nargis hit the Southeast Asian nation, also known as Burma, early Saturday. Some villages have been almost totally eradicated and vast rice-growing areas are wiped out, the World Food Program said.

According to a report from Associated Press, images from state television showed large trees and electricity poles sprawled across roads and roofless houses ringed by large sheets of water in the Irrawaddy River delta region, which is regarded as Myanmar’s rice bowl. “From the reports we are getting, entire villages have been flattened and the final death toll may be huge,” Mac Pieczowski, who heads the International Organization for Migration office in Yangon, said in a statement.

According to a report from Channelnewsasia.com, “NASA pictures taken on Monday showed the entire coastal plain under water, with fallow agricultural areas of the delta – the country’s main rice-growing region – particularly hard hit by flooding. The storm hammered the country’s former capital, Yangon, over the weekend and left hundreds of thousands homeless across the country. The images showed the city, which sits on the delta’s southeastern edge and has a population of more than six million, surrounded by flooding.

Foreign aid teams have described scenes of horror in the region, with rice fields littered with corpses and desperate survivors without food or shelter four days after the storm struck.

The United Nations has warned that the widespread flooding will pose a “major challenge” to aid organisations desperately struggling to get assistance to those affected.

It believes hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless in the Yangon region alone, and there are fears of disease spreading in the absence of proper shelter and drinking water.

For those of you in Singapore who want to make a donation to help out the people in Myanmar, you can do it through the Singapore’s World Vision Website: http://www.worldvision.org.sg/st_newsroom.php

For those not in Singapore, I do not know how you may be able to make a donation. If you know of any website where you can make an online donation, do feel free to let me know. Many thanks!

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2 thoughts on “An Urgent Call to Act

  1. Marlene

    This is another catastrophy that the world should look into now. It’s in the newspaper here everyday and it’s so sad to think that the number of fatalities is increasing. On the other hand, I’m grateful that countries like you has initiated a financial aid to this victim country.

  2. Symphony of Love Post author

    Although it is not an obligation, I guess anyone can take proactive action to help. I find that being a blogger, we are in an even better position to let people know about things happening in the world.