Disaster preparedness through education: the missing piece?
@swarup and @barun_ghimire, I’m very much with you about your ideas for “disaster preparedness through education”! After the earthquake, I marvelled how quickly people can self-organize help after a disaster. But the volunteer disaster response movement could even be better, faster and larger. If “how to be part of volunteer disaster response” would be part of the “curriculum” for disaster preparedness, it might be the missing piece for better volunteer / community-driven disaster response.
That knowledge is not documented yet (as far as I know; I collected some pieces into a recent post, but it’s only a start). Inviting the people who led these volunteer disaster response initiatives here in Nepal might be a way to start though (and it’s often surprising who stepped forward into these leadership roles, responding to the need to help).
Why am I writing this … . I have the impression that the Nepal society is not an environment to organize big, top-down, strictly organized disaster response forces (as the Chinese do, for example). Rather, the strength here seems to be fast and organic, community-driven response. If education can strengthen that more, maybe this grassroots way of disaster preparedness is the much cheaper, more efficient alternative? It would enable people to quickly switch over from “normal mode” to “disaster response mode”, everyone knowing what to do and how to work to limit and fix the damages after a disaster. Not “knowing” from specific commands, but from being expert enough in the matter to know what’s the next step.
Any thoughts if and how this could play out in Nepal’s society? The still missing piece seems to me a way to extend this education to adults somehow …