“We’re just numbers to them. I’m just how many sandwiches I needed today. Just how many rolls of toilet paper. Nothing else.”
“I can’t express how hard it was to get boots on the ground. Impossible. And no one told the locals that we were trying. So when we got there, finally, it was bad. Real bad. We were scared.”
“The heat. The smoke. Unimaginable. You don’t want to fight it. But you have to. You forget the pay, you know, it’s good but you forget that. You’re here to save a forest, the homes around it, lives. So you cough, you burn, but you suck it up.”
“We’re people. We’re people too! You people out there come down here telling us how to do things and never asking, not once, how we want to do it.”
Funded by a generous grant by the Sylff Association of Tokyo, this project seeks to collect, analyze, and share stories of disaster survivors and practitioners. The project is starting in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. The project begins in 2026 and is seeking your stories about your work, your recovery, your successes, and your struggles.
Help this project reach new heights.
Every penny helps. Your support will be used to:
Build open science databases that are GDPR compliant
Share research analysis with practitioners, NGOs, and researchers
Reach out and travel to collect more stories to share and empower.