I know everyone was awestruck by the images, video and written accounts of the multiple earthquakes in Japan. I was surprised when I returned home from work at 6 p.m. PT and saw that the live coverage was no different from what I was watching the previous night at 1 a.m. PT.
As you can imagine, there were a flurry of emails going around between the country reps and CLAIR on how we could support any effort to provide relief. We decided on two avenues:
- If you know someone is OK and want to let other people their OK, please update their information on Google Person Finder (see the post below). You can search and make updates in both English and Japanese.
- If you are looking for any information on someone that you know within the JET community, Bob Schnyder created a discussion on the official JETAA page on Facebook. The discussion is like any forum, and is organized by prefecture (if you don’t see your prefecture there, please feel free to start a new topic).
In terms of helping out, this is the best round-up that I’ve found on the web. It lists out the various donation funds that are going towards the relief, including American Red Cross, Save the Children, International Medical Corps, Salvation Army and Doctors Without Boarders. The Japan Society of Boston has already created a great earthquake relief page, and JETAANY has set up a donation page. Does anyone know of a relief effort that is being organized to go to Japan and physically help out?
What I’ve noticed about this disaster is that friends from high school and other walks of life that expressed concern and a desire to help out, donate, etc. This led to a discussion with Mark Frey, communications director of JETAANC, and we’ve been trying to coordinate a fundraiser with other Japan-related groups around San Francisco early next week. We’ve also trying to brainstorm various different ideas on what else we can do to mobilize not only the Japan-related community, but the larger San Francisco community to help out with the disaster.
If any chapter is interested in sharing what their chapters are doing on this blog, please contact me: us1.jetaausa (at) gmail.com. Also, please feel free to share, please do so in the comments section or send me an email.
