Tag Archives: earthquake

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Preparedness

I am at a friend’s: she doesn’t have matches.
I am at a friend’s: she doesn’t have bandaids.
“You need a tsunami kit,” I say. “Now!”

My daughter made a tsunami kit for college
with a life straw, an emergency blanket, ace wraps
and bandaids. A leatherwoman for tools with a knife.

Watching after the earthquake, it’s the crowbar I think of.
It is in my back yard, under the apple tree.
If we have our earthquake, I should be able to find it.

Or if I can’t, you know where it is now.
Please, take it to help someone
if I can’t.

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Prayers for people in Turkey and Syria

I took this photograph with my phone yesterday before I heard the news.

The ambulance has been out for a week or so, along with the doll tent. Two doll babies, the doll doctor, various pieces of equipment. I took the photograph because the cats keep “helping” and it keeps looking a bit like a disaster. Sigh. I wish they were just doll disasters with giant cats wandering through, not real earthquakes.

I wrote Flooded after the tsunami in Japan, about PTSD and about feeling helpless watching. I think we all have a little post-Pandemic PTSD and are more hair trigger and more ready for fight or flight.

Send prayers and money and huge blessings on on the first responders that are heading there or are already there.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: strange.

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You cannot be in love with every beautiful thing you see

Here is the prompt: a write up on (sorry. the ethics of the site changed, precluding my linking to it).

You cannot be in love with every beautiful thing you see

I cannot be in love with every beautiful thing I see

why?

what is beauty?
what is beauty to you?
what is beauty to me?

I like the trees
I like the ocean
I like the dunes
I like the grass

They don’t lie to me

They don’t wear masks

If they gossip, I don’t understand
so it doesn’t matter

When birds sing
I sing back
I don’t know what they are saying
but I try

They sing back to me

My cat is here
talking to me
meow, mew
I can tell when she has a toy
or a mouse
(or a bat)
by her voice

The dunes will fall
in an earthquake

I may be buried
if I am on the beach

like lava eating houses
lava burying people alive
suffocating

though on the beach
I’d be crushed
it’s not like snow
our dunes come down with trees
when they come down

yet I walk the beach anyhow
go about my life

in love with every beautiful thing I see

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ShelterBox

ShelterBox is a disaster relief organization that delivers a box with a family size tent, solar lights, water storage and purification equipment, thermal blankets and cooking utensils, and some things for children. The goal is immediate shelter and to help start the process of creating a home. The boxes are delivered to people world wide that have been hit by a disaster, man made or natural. They prepare and adjust them for local conditions.

ShelterBox started in 2000 in Helston, Cornwall, UK. That year, the Rotary Club of Helston-Lizard adopted it as its millennium project. The first shipment of 143 boxes went to was sent to victims of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake. ShelterBox ramped up during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. ShelterBox provided shelter for 28,000 families after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti in 2010, about 25% of the tents sent by charities.

In the US, a ShelterBox costs $1000.00 to sponsor. Our small Sunrise Rotary Club buys at least one each year. We are notified that our box from last year went to Syrian refugees. I am so glad to be part of an organization that is doing something that is specific and positive in the world. Also, we are in a serious earthquake and tsunami zone: I hope someone sends us ShelterBoxes when we get hit. I prepare, but I keep wondering where to store things. If the house falls down, it seems unlikely that I could get to my stores….

ShelterBox gets a very high rating from Charity Navigator. Rotary International chose ShelterBox as their first Project Partner in 2012 and has renewed the partnership with ShelterBox in 2016 for another three year term.

ShelterBox: https://www.shelterbox.org/
Rotary and ShelterBox: http://www.shelterboxusa.org/about.php?page=16
wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShelterBox
Charity Navigator: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?keyword_list=ShelterBox&Submit2=Search&bay=search.results
Music: Would you harbor me?
http://ptsunriserotary.org/

I was going to work at clinic one day last week and I was feeling down and tired. I saw this rainbow and stopped in a parking lot to photograph it. And the brighter one is leading directly to my clinic and my work.

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Emergency preparedness

In Venezuela now
some people get water once a week
and sicken from it

First, withdrawal
When we have our eathquake
Tsumani and roads and bridges are gone

If one in three adults in Utah
Got an opioid prescription in 2014
What are the numbers here?
Opioids
Alcohol
Benzos
Caffeine
After the first wave of death
and grief, withdrawal begins
Not just addictive drugs
from insulin
from blood pressure meds
anticoagulants
seizure medicine
chemo ground to a halt
I read that alcohol is best to trade in disaster
and chaos and loss
Guarded by guns in small gangs
We are told to store water
Where?
If the house falls down
and I can get out, where would I put water?
A bunker in the ground?
I stock straws for water
I wish I could buy 9000
for my town
I stock books for when the computers
go silent
I stock songs in my head
memorized all
I fight for all my patients
Who would I not fight for?
Maybe it would be better to die
or be captured early
I stock love not guns.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/05/26/world/americas/desperate-times-in-venezuela/s/27VENEZUELA-SS-slide-3ZIT.html?_r=0

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/26/utah-mormons-prescription-painkiller-addiction

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

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Parking

I park on the hill

I walk to the coffee shop by the water
because I dream of earthquakes

The car is up the hill

I say to the earth
Wait
Please wait until the construction is done
So the old buildings won’t fall down

Today I see
The earthquake has happened

You died

Death heals any split left within us

I know you are healed

You are with our mother
Our grandparents
Our ancestors
And know you are loved

I know I am not really separated from you

I know that I will see you again

And yet each minute lasts 1000 years
Until I see you again

The earthquake has happened

I still ask the earth to wait

I still park on the hill.

5/10/12