Skip to main content

Putting things in perspective

We arrived home from Yorkshire today to find half our living room and kitchen were flooded. Our table, futon, PC (I'm writing on our dinky laptop), carpet and ceiling are damaged as well as some minor bits of electronic kit.

This is very annoying but when I see images of the flood in Pakistan it really is nothing. Yes, it smells funky, yes, my favourite old, well travelled address book is damaged but no-one has died, we're not at risk of cholera or malaria and I doubt either of us is going to starve. Even the errant Black Cat wandered in safe and sound as if nothing had happened.

MSF are working their socks off in Pakistan, setting up Cholera stations, proving shelter, clean water and medical care to some of the 14 million people (yes 14 million, hard to imagine isn't it) affected by the floods.

This MSF water distribution truck provides water to victims of the floods who are displaced and in need of clean drinking water. Nowshera, 27th July 2010. Photo by Ton Koene/MSF Photo via www.msf.org.uk
It's easy to make a donation to MSF. You can do it on their website or via the p/hop widgets on my blog. 
£5.51 provides a mosquito net which will help prevent a family from getting malaria, dengue fever or other mosquito transmitted diseases. Not bad for the equivalent of one 50g ball of nice yarn or a couple of shop bought sandwiches eh?

Comments

Northern Monkey said…
How annoying that your house was flooded (even if it doesn't compare to the awful flooding Pakistan) I hope you manage to get everything dried out and insurance sorted quickly.

I've donated to the DEC but will be sending some money in MSF's direction as well.

Popular posts from this blog

Lashing and lashings...

As well as talk of Clementine Cake on twitter there has been talk of brewing Ginger Beer. Ginger beer is my drink of choice and I'm always in search of a good one. I find many commercial ones too sweet. Once on holiday in Brasil I had a ginger beer made with freshly squeezed ginger which is the gold standard at the moment and a tough act to live up to. @eskimimi (who has a lovely blog ) linked to this River Cottage recipe last week . I had to hunt around for brewers yeast as the brewer's yeast you can buy in chemists and health food shops is deactivated so won't work for brewing, despite the name. (trade descriptions act anyone?). I ended up buying my yeast online after consulting my brewing guru Bioniclaura . As well as knitting Laura brews her own beer, which I got sample when I stayed with her and her lovely dog and husband in Dublin when I went over at the end of October. More on that later. I couldn't wait to get started but had to wait til we returned from Hasti

We have a winner...

Check out my pea seedling, how intact and un-nibbled it is. My mysterious object, as correctly guessed by Madmurdock and Montyknits, is a gastropod guard. It seems to be working. I'd heard that slugs and snails don't like slithering over hair. I tried using hair clippings a few years ago as a barrier. It worked for a few days, til I found chewed, leafless stems and on further inspection a guilty slug covered in ginger hair. Hopefully the fleecy barrier will stay in place and mean I get a good late crop of peas. Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who took part.

Ceilings

Over Easter we went to Istanbul. It's one of those cities that's been lurking in the corners of my mind, from tales of Roman Constantinople, to bordering Europe and Asia with its dreaming mosque minarets. So I booked a bargain of a city break two days before we left, chucked some clothes in a bag, picked up a guidebook and off we went. There are more blog posts and photos on the way, as we had an excellent time there, but as you can see I was quite taken with ceilings and spent most of our four days there looking up.