My Motherland, Kerala, India has witnessed the most devastating flood in history. For the last 14 days, I was volunteering with tens and thousands of volunteers & I am writing down some of the observations to avoid confusions.
Kerala, India - is an province/state with very high health standards, low infant mortality rate, high population density and even higher literacy. The high population density has caused massive damages which is not yet assessed. Fisherman responded to the request of help which reduced the death toll.
The rescue relief efforts are beyond the any boundaries of caste or religion - the common man here has only one religion and that called "HUMANITY"
Government of Kerala + Government of India & the Volunteers from all over India are working together. I repeat, its not a scenario where Government efforts and Volunteering efforts are happening in parallel. The Government of Kerala has taken the unconventional step of getting the help of volunteers and they are taking every possible to step to consolidate the efforts of Volunteers and Governments.
I repeat the point 3 again for the benefit of International NGOs, as an independent volunteer, I am surprised by the steps taken by the Government of Kerala to unite and take help from the volunteering groups and please do not try to convince the government to convince the need to use volunteers/NGOs etc but rather, join the effort lead by the Government.
- Technical platform following the guidelines from (The Sphere project)[www.spherehandbook.org/en/what-is-sphere/] is developed https://keralarescue.in/ under the leader ship of a young engineering student Biswas. This uses tool like Django based rescue system, Ushahidi, KoboToolbox, NodeJS based volunteer registration, HDX etc
Before and After
A pregnant woman airlifted by navy. She delivered in the navy hospital in less than 2 hours. Everyone is safe!
(screen grabs from a video by me. Video source unknown)
relief materials (photo taken by a friend)
PS: Any money raised through this post will be donated to the Government of Kerala's Relief fund : https://donation.cmdrf.kerala.gov.in/index.php/
international donations can be done via Transferwise too https://transferwise.com/gb/blog/stand-with-kerala