KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA--The following three paragraphs are excerpts from the latest by The Star's "Wheel Power" columnist Anthony Thanasayan (Source: Inclusion Daily Express)
THE tsunami tragedy of Dec. 26 last month continues to make a deep impact in many of our lives. Some of you wrote to Wheel Power to ask if I had come across accounts of how disabled people in the affected areas were surviving the trauma and devastation caused by the killer tides. Inclusion Daily Express (IDE), an international disability rights news service from Spokane, Washington, reported last week that relief agencies in Galle in Sri Lanka are already at work and doing their best to help people with disabilities struck by the tsunamis.
IDE's editor Dave Reynolds wrote that worldwide humanitarian groups have started to pour aid into the Indian Ocean nations that were affected by the disaster. News stories of people with disabilities, he continued, particularly children caught without warning in the devastating tidal waves have been posted from Australia to California and from Thailand to Sri Lanka.
I came across the good and remarkable work done by the British-based Handicap International (HI) organisation through the Internet (http://www.handicap-international.org.uk). HI has set up a 24-hour emergency programme to help especially Sri Lankan victims of the tsunami focusing on displaced people, individuals with temporary or permanent disabilities as well as vulnerable populations, such as children, pregnant women and elderly people.
Entire article:"Heroic efforts in saving disabled victims" (The Star)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/05/red/0113b.htm