In late October, Barbara Kline-Schoder was watching Afghani refugees shivering on television and she decided that her time to get involved in Sept. 11 relief efforts had come.
She approached John Radebaugh, a fellow member of the Upper Valley Society of Friends, and together they organized a project to get blankets and sweaters to refugee camps on the borders of Afghanistan.
Kline-Schoder and Radebaugh's project was one of the highlights of Thursday's Community Hour discussion on the broader effects of Sept. 11 relief efforts. The four panelists from the Upper Valley discussed their personal choices to give back to the international community in the aftermath of terrorism.
"All we could see was all this negative energy around us," Kline-Schoder remarked. "I wanted to reverse it, to do something positive."
They were joined by Cindy Hahn, the director of emergency services for the American Red Cross in Vermont and New Hampshire, which has spent the last five months organizing support for victims in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. -- victims that had also lost their homes, their loved ones and their sense of security.
Forty volunteers from the Upper Valley community have been deployed to Ground Zero at the former site of the World Trade Center, beginning a process of rebuilding lives that Hahn estimates will continue for the next 10 to 15 years.
Han noted that the unprecedented outpouring of support for domestic victims has been fantastic -- and at times even excessive.
"Once we had collected $500 million, we asked that donations be diverted to other causes. $300 million has come in since then, and it still hasn't stopped," she said.
Bill Carter, the fourth member of the panel, represented Ashoka, an organization dedicated to promoting "professional social entrepreneurship." Carter discussed the difficulties of building a cultural bridge to the Middle East, where institutions enabling Western influence are essentially nonexistent.
"Social entrepreneurship is the best antidote to terrorism. We go in to places were society is 'stuck,' and we're certainly seeing more interest in 'un-sticking' the Middle East right now," Carter said.
Kline-Schoder and Radebaugh agreed that the process of organizing relief for a country so far away presented interesting difficulties.
"In December we got our sweaters to Philadelphia so that they could catch a boat from Baltimore headed to Pakistan," Kline-Schoder said. "Then they'll board 40-foot trucks to the next place, and smaller trucks to the actual camps."
The sweaters' final destination will depend on how close to Afghanistan the trucks can get.
"But we have faith they will get there -- or at least as close as is humanly possible," Kline-Schoder added with a smile.
The event's moderate attendance seemed to reflect a persistent interest in the lingering effects of Sept. 11, especially in the nation's relief responses.
