Last year my home state was ravaged by flood and storm. The television cameras, journalists and reporters are long gone, but recovery is ongoing and our rural and regional communities still need our help.
Earlier this year, The Hoopla published my piece about this catastrophe, and the effects on the spirit of flood-affected communities. Recovery and healing take many forms. Please read the full article, put your heads together with a few friends and colleagues, and dream up some smart, innovative heart-filled ways of helping our ‘country cousins’.
Flood-mud stinks. it’s hideous, filthy and nasty.
A volunteer also notices “it stings my eyes and I feel it all over me; rotten and mixed with the spoil of ruined lives”. Another is startled. “Whatever’s in it makes your clothes disintegrate. It eats right through stuff.”
There is mould. White, furry, stringy and pernicious, it will lurk forever behind skirting boards, beneath floorboards and between VJs. You can hit it with bleach, but a week later it’s back. Sinister and bizarre, when it returns, it’s black, not white.
There’s the niggling sense that sooner or later this mould will make people sick. Read on…
Margi Macdonald 
Margi, this sounds like a bad horror movie.
Not what you’d expect in a first world country is it?
There are people still waiting for insurance companies to approve their claims, more than 12 months on.
So much ‘invisible’ suffering.
The US is still dealing with the effects of Katrina- so that’s two first world countries operating under par.
Lynn, I had a feeling that might be the case.
How much do our two countries spend on futile wars in far away places?
I have great difficulty understanding how and why it is that our governments prioritise things as they do.
I don’t get it either, Margi.