The Aussie Spirit
First, I'd like to thank all of our Collie friends who have been in contact with us over the last few weeks. We are currently safe. For the most part, our area of New South Wales has been mostly unaffected. We have been dealing with smoke haze, high temperatures, and drought, but we are not under any threat of bushfire at this point in time.
As many of you know, large parts of Australia are on fire right now. These fires started months ago and have just gotten worse as the season has continued. We've lost around a billion animals, around 25 people (I haven't seen confirmed numbers recently), a bit over 25 million acres of land have been burned, almost 2,000 homes have been destroyed, and over 70,000 RFS volunteers working in NSW. That number of volunteers doesn't include the firies in other states, or the SES, the ADF, Fire & Rescue, police, ambulance, firefighters from other countries, wildlife organisations, and everyone else doing their bit in this crisis.
The question I have seen a lot of people asking is what can they do to help. I have been struggling with this for a few weeks now too. I keep asking myself what I can do to help, I've donated where I can and put out water for animals that might need it with a lot of their usual water sources gone. But I feel like this isn't enough, and I'm not sure what else to do. So I drew a comic and thought I’d share it with you.
I have also heard comments from people from other countries about how amazing it is that us Aussies have pulled together to help each other out, which seems odd to me. Because that is just what we do, it is ingrained in our culture to help each other out and maybe have a bit of a laugh while we do it. We will recover from this, it will take a lot of time and effort, but if anyone can bounce back it's the Aussies.
I'm not really sure what the point of this post is. It's a mix of letting you know that Holly and our family are safe from these fires for now, to let you know what is going on in Australia if somehow you don't already know, and maybe a little for me to organise my feelings on the matter. I'd just like to thank everyone that has contributed to helping in any way, whether you are one of our amazing heroes that are on the front lines or even someone that spared a few dollars to donate to one of the many deserving charities helping us. Thank you.
If you have made it this far through this very long post and would like to donate, there is a list of some very deserving charities and organisations that are working to help us in this crisis.
Port Macquarie Koala Hospital (you can adopt a koala)
