I have had a rather interesting week and it has proved how valuable information on your intended travel plans is to your friends and family back home in the event of a crisis. I am left with the intention of always logging my details on Smart Traveller and being consistent with updating friends and family if plans change. I hope this story inspires others to do the same as you may understand how worried people back home can be with no form of communication.
As you can already figure out, we have been the ones at home while a friend was overseas in the affected area of a crisis. We have been in Perth for about a year now and consider this person one of our closest friends in the area…but isn’t it funny how these days no one really knows much about their friends! I’m going a bit off course here but I’m thinking about the TV programmes about border security and the officers find it ridiculous that people travel together but don’t know their surname or where they live etc. …actually it’s normal! So I’m going to lay out the story so you can understand the frustrations and how little you can know about a person and genuinely care about them.
This week there has been a tsunami in Samoa, which thankfully we haven’t been directly affected and my heart goes out to those who lost loved ones. The very next day there was an earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia. I heard this on the news in the morning and didn’t think much of it, until I arrived at work and opened the news page and saw the location…Padang! It’s ringing bells…and the destruction looks insane…wait a minute that’s where our friend is!! He is also new to Perth so he doesn’t really know many people here either, at least no one that we know. So we start calling up the friends of friends we do know…who have all scattered around the country or back home to New Zealand. With the connection between these friends mainly being the mines, it was rather difficult getting hold of anyone as there is very limited cell phone coverage at the mines in the outback. Getting hold of who we can, we try and muster up his surname..it’s kind of a weird one so we don’t know the exact spelling or pronunciation! Does anyone know his family back in NSW? No…
The joys of being a “backpacker” huh? We make friendships easily but when it comes to knowing the nitty gritty…it just doesn’t seem to come up in conversation!
It doesn’t really help that this person is a bit of a free spirit and doesn’t use facebook or email a lot, so all we are left with is his mobile number. Of course Padang is rather “off the beaten track” and we wouldn’t know if there was any coverage there without an earthquake! After unsuccessful attempts at getting hold of friends who would know his family, we tried the free phone number for the department of foreign affairs. With a mis-spelt surname we try gain access to information but they don’t have him on file he’s considered “missing”. They don’t have any record of anyone with a similar name so they ask us to gather as much information about him and his trip that we can.
Here is what we know:
As a travel agent, he asked me to look into his flights, I gave him info and he booked online. We have the details of what flights he wanted
He went there to surf off the coast of Padang
He was hiring a boat with friends, travelling with 2 friends of his from NSW whom we don’t know…they could have added more to this boat or not..
We have pictures, age etc.
We know where he lives
We know he works for a pipe welding company in Malaga, Perth but no google search brings it up!
As you can tell, we don’t have anything solid to go off and nobody’s at his house..we have no idea how to get hold of anyone or any more information!
I actually stopped writing after that last sentence as I didn’t know how this story was going to end…it’s now 5days later and we only now truly know he’s ok because he is back! Once we ended up getting hold of one of his friends who knew his father, we were dropped out of the loop and only felt ease when we read an article saying all the Australian’s registered had been contacted and were confirmed ok. As we had registered him, we knew he must have been alright. So at this very moment my partner is catching up with his friend and hearing the story of the ordeal. It sounds like it’s really had an impact on his life.
So from here on, I will be logging my details with friends and the government just in case something may happen while I’m overseas…then at least they would have the resources to locate me. I would encourage you to do the same to ease the worry of your family and friends.
Tanya Joines and Scott Pilgrim co-founded Discover and Succeed to help people understand the law of attraction and to provide a vehicle to create the wealth and lifestyle they desire.
