Communications from Chaos
Job 1 - Establish Comms
Too Big to Tackle Alone
If you ever wanted to save the world but don’t know where or how to start, you understand how Glen and I felt after we sailed around the world. Our voyage was mostly full of exciting adventures, but it also brought insight to some dire, heartbreaking situations; landslides in Venezuela, tsunami in the Indian Ocean, refugees in Djibouti and Sudan along the Red Sea… Then, on the home front, my parent’s house was flooded with 21 feet of water during Hurricane Katrina. Leaving our sailboat in the Mediterranean Ocean, we flew to Bay St Louis on the Gulf Coast to help my parents salvage what they could and forge a new life in the aftermath.
Suddenly, we were among the people who needed help instead of sailors in remote areas of the world who dropped in for a few days of good works. The experience of helping others in a crisis was rewarding at a depth that affected our spirit. Glen and I vowed that when it was our time to pay back, we would volunteer for the American Red Cross—we had seen that organization doing good works all over the world, as well as America.
Our first disaster work was the aftermath of a Category Five storm—Hurricane Katrina. Pitching in with thousands of other volunteers, we discovered that disaster response work is messy, chaotic at first, and difficult always. But we were hooked. It felt great to be vital and useful in a meaningful way. Since then Glen and I have deployed to disasters in the United States and internationally. Watch this video produced by Nina Svahn, a gutsy Finnish videographer and fellow Red Cross volunteer who accompanied me into the hardship areas of Nepal to install communications and internet for Red Cross field hospitals, surgical units and clinics. It’s a short video but you can see some of the realities of life on a deployment. Who knows, you may want to do something similar.