On December 26, 2006, a tsunami raced through the Bay of Bengal and killed over 260,000 people. Many of those victims were on the northern tip of the Island of Sumatra in Indonesia.
Since then, CRWRC (Christian Reformed World Relief Committee) has spent millions of dollars to put lives and communities back together. That’s not so unusual. CRWRC does that. What’s rather unique about this story is that Banda Aceh (pronounced A-chay), the community at the tip of Sumatra—the one that got hit hardest by the tsunami—is a Muslim community.
Next week I’m going to Banda Aceh to help CRWRC tell the story of what they’ve been doing since the tsunami hit.
It’s not part of the slum documentary, but yet it is. It’s a story about people who are “down on their luck,” people who needed a hand—and got one. Slum dwellers often don’t get that helping hand. Because their needs are chronic and never ending, we tend not to notice. But when a tsunami hits and takes out a couple hundred thousand people, we notice.
I’ll write about my experiences on these pages and tell some of the stories of the people I meet. I hope you’ll forgive me for using the Slum Doc blog to tell a different kind of story here.
On another note: I love fine coffee. My favorite is Sumatra from Starbucks. I’ll see what I can find on Sumatra J
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