Tsunami Fund

For the past few weeks, I've been going out around town distributing my company's Tsunami Fund. Back in January, the company collected about $10,000 in contribution from our employees around the world. About $5000 went to the two employees that were based in Aceh at the time of the tsunami. What to do with the other 5 grand? One of our staff wanted to assemble backpacks with school supplies for kids and other ideas included building a house for someone. At the end, the idea was to have each of our staff (by then, we had a staff of 12) to nominate someone they know who lost a lot of their possession or livelihood in the tsunami. So the past 3 weeks, I've been going out to all parts of Banda Aceh, into these people's homes (for one guy, he lived in a different place each night and we visited him at the government pawn shop office where he had spent the previous night). The demography/profession of the recipients varied widely. There was a lady in her 50s who had lost her cake making business, a young girl in her late teens who lost both of her parents and needed money to continue schooling, a handyman who lost all of his tools, an older woman whose 20 relatives had been living with her since January, and a young man looking to start a curtain making business. For most of these residents of the city, have have not received any help from aid organizations and do not know how to ask for aid. People often point out how high the flood water reached or the railing they held on to for life. The entire experience has been really humbling and I really hope these 15 lucky people will put the money to good use.